In this post we are going to go through an in-depth analysis of AMD, we are going to take a look at their fundamental value, their DCF, do a little technical analysis and set some price targets for the near future and for the long term ~Very Long Post~ [Do NOT Read if you don't like comprehensive analysis] Hello everyone! Let’s start by talking a little about AMD, they are one of the biggest semiconductor companies in the world, and they operate in multiple segments like Computing, Gaming, Enterprise, Semi-Custom and many more with some of the most important products for the company being microprocessors and GPUs both for personal use like (gaming consoles & PCs) while also offering products for professional use like data centers. The company was founded more than 50 years ago and have more than 11K employees, with the company overperforming recently as they have seen a more than 80% rise in the last year. So, guys, let’s go a little through the 4th quarter & yearly results for AMD. The company reported a revenue of $3.24B in the 4th quarter, with a 53% growth since last year, while for the full year they earned almost $10B as they more than doubled they quarterly and full year net income, which resulted in a $1.29 earnings/share for the year. The company has 2 major income segments in Computing & Graphics which brought in sales of over $6.4B for the year and an operating income of $1.26B and the Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom segment which brought in $3.3B in revenues and almost $400M in operating income. They also provide an additional segment that doesn’t bring in any revenues but which represents costs that can’t be associated with any of the other 2 segments, but also includes stock-based compensations and acquisitions related costs. Both of these 2 segments have seen huge increases in the past year with operating income doubling for the computing & graphics segment and increasing by almost 50% for the EEC segment. AMD didn’t have such a big capital expenditure in 2020, with only $294M but this can increase depending on the demand of their products while they also adjusted their income with $312M in depreciation & amortizations. Both of these numbers have increased by 40 to 50% in the past years and will be important in the DCF valuation. They have also managed to increase the gross profit margin to 45%, up 2% from 2019 as their earnings before interest & tax or EBIT stood at $1.37B. The company has seen a continued earnings per share growth overall, despite the first 2 quarters of 2020 coming in lower than previous, but that was to be expected as this was impacted by the reduced revenues in Q1 & Q2 before things started to pick up back again, as they finished with a huge increase overall in the 4th quarter. Their product portfolio has become a great challenge to Intel’s market share and is continuing to evolve, as Intel is still struggling to regain momentum with their products. AMD announced the world’s best processors for laptop and an enterprise variant that is expected to be available in the first half of 2021. They have also launched the fastest AMD gaming graphics card ever while also working with big companies like Amazon on their AWS cloud offerings & Microsoft Azure which are planning to use their upcoming 3rd generation EPYC processors. AMD is also involved in supercomputers which indicates that they are continuing to innovate and develop products that will be in high demand for the foreseeable future The one big thing that can propel AMD even more in the future is the proposed acquisition or more rather merger with Xilinx , which also beat earnings expectations the other day, with revenues of over $800M for the quarter and a Free Cash Flow of 44% of their revenues. Xilinx has a market cap of over $32B, and the combination of the 2 companies would create synergies. They are targeting an all-stock transaction which will have implications on my projections, but as time has gone, the $35B price tag is only a 10% premium for Xilinx. The one hurdle the companies have to pass is the regulatory procedures. We will have to wait and see if the deal goes through or not, as it’s expected the deal should be finished by the end of the year, with AMD shareholders retaining 74% of the new group shares and Xilinx holding the remaining 26%. AMD also offered great guidance for 2021 as they expect the strength of their product portfolio to push AMD revenues up 37% over 2020 and also expect their gross margin to increase to 47%, while they expect an effective tax rate for next year of 15%, well belove the 21% US corporate tax rate. I have made some predictions based on the growth rate of the company, the latest plans announced by them and used some estimates and expectations. So, keep in mind this are only projections and are calculated by myself, this is not an investment advice and you should do your own research and so on… So, let’s start with the Unleveraged discounted free cash flow projections to see what the current valuation of the company is. I used their total revenues projections that we will discuss later on in the long-term projection and the net income for 2020 to which I added back the Depreciation & Amortization costs they had in 2020 and got to a $1.68B EBITDA. For the next years I used 1% increase in EBIT margin which I think they can achieve pretty easy and an increase in capex of 10%/year in order to maintain an increased production capacity while also applying a 15% decrease in their net working capital. So, for an 8% discount rate, which is pretty much the Average SP500 return, we get a $9.7B Discounted Free Cash Flow by 2025. Now there are 2 methods of doing the valuation, either the perpetuity method or the EBITDA multiple method, but for both of them we do have to subtract or add the net assets or debt, which in this case stands $5.75B in assets. I personally think a use of the average is better suited for most companies, though some of the companies trade largely on the EBITDA approach and other on the growth approach. If we use the growth approach, we can see that AMD is pretty fairly valued right now, as this implies a loss of 2%, while on the other hand the EBITDA multiple approach gives us a valuation of over $112, meaning an almost 30% undervaluation of the company. But as I said, I think a use of the average is best, so, my current price target for AMD in 2021 is $98.82, implying a 13.5% return from the last price. And now let’s move on to a longer-term valuation of the company based on the growth projections I have for AMD. For my projections I actually just used their full year results and implied different growth rates for each revenue stream. I think we can continue to see 50% growth rate in the EEC segment for 2021 and then implying a gradual slowing of their growth, while for the Computing & Graphics segment I implied a 35% growth, way lower than the over 100% they saw in 2020, also implying a gradual slowdown of the trend by 2025. I think these growth implications are pretty reasonable giving the high demand the company has seen for their entire product line, especially as gaming revenues have continued to increase, and also taking into account the need for their products in data centers, cloud usage & digital currency mining. For their cost of sales, I started from the current ones which stand at 80% for the Computing & Graphics segment and implied a 1% improvement each year, while for the EEC segment I started from the 88% expense margin right now and implied a gradual 2% improvement. I also maintained their other expense regarding to the cost of sales to 3% of their total revenues, in-line with the previous years. This means for 2025 we would get just over $33B in revenues and $26B in expenses, resulting in a gross profit of almost $7B. I also maintained the same capex as in the DCF and also substracted the interest & other expenses for which I implied a 5% annual growth, thus leading us to a $6.28B in earnings before tax. I maintained their 15% effective tax rate projections and also diluted their shares by 1% each year accounting for some dilution in the stock. So, for the $5.3B in 2025 revenues after tax and accounting for 1.27B shares, that would mean a $4.21 earnings/share, meaning the stock is trading at 20 times forward price to earnings for 2025. I like to base my future projections on Forward/PE valuations so, with the current projected PE and depending on what PE you assume for the stock between 25 and 40, the stock can trade between $105 and almost $168. So, after all these estimates what are my price targets? HERE are my actual price targets I think the 2025 bear case price we can see AMD trade at is $115 which would imply a return of almost 33% , while my base case and my pretty safe assumption is that AMD will trade at 137$/share by the end of 2025, implying a 57% return on the current price. But my most bullish case would see the company trading at $158, which would imply a return of over 81%. So yeah guys, these are my Overall price targets for 2025, my bear case is an average of the 25 & 30 PE ratio, while the normal case is the average between the 30 and 35 PE’s with the most bullish case valuing the company between a PE of 35-40. So HERE is the full spreadsheet that I have projected for AMD by 2025, if you do have another opinion or a suggestion please leave a comment down below, I think I have been conservative in most of my projections, but feel free to give your opinion. I think these are pretty reasonable targets, as the semiconductors industry will keep on booming in the next decade, as the world will need more & more chips that also keep advancing in technology. The company also has very good financials, with almost $9B in assets vs just $3.1B in total liabilities, which can be easily paid by just the current assets. And let’s also take a look at what the estimates are from the analysts. We can only see EPS estimates until 2023 of $3.22, which I think is safe to say can grow an additional dollar by 2025, so my projections are pretty in-line with what other experts anticipate. So, what do I expect in the next couple of days, weeks and months for AMD? Let’s look at this CHART, the stock just broke below the long-term uptrend but has seen good support at the $86-87 levels, which is where the next support should stand. We saw AMD pushing towards $100 in the beginning of the year, but it hit major resistance once Intel also announced a change in their leadership, as they brought in the WMWare CEO Gelsinger, but it’s very hard to see him turn around Intel in a very short time. Intel will need some years & a lot of capital expenditure to turn things around, if they do manage to do it at all. AMD hasn’t been overbought since August, and currently has an RSI near 41, which is pretty oversold for a good company, so I expect to see them regaining some momentum in the near-term, but I guess the market is very busy with the current short-squeezes. AMD will se a lot of resistance breaking through the $100 level, not because of something fundamental with the company, but I guess it’s a psychological resistance rather. And let’s take a quick look at what 24 analysts on Wall Street are saying. They mostly have a buy call on the company with an average price target of $100 and a high price target of $135. So, I think the analyst are pretty spot on with AMD, but my PT are slightly lower as it’s always better to undershoot and overperform rather than the other way around. So, what would I do? Well, I own AMD stock and I believe it still has plenty of room to grow, so I would start building a position right now and add on any weakness, and I would especially buy more if the stock drops even lower than 80$. One last thing to mention about AMD is that they also have a very big % of their shares held by institutions, with over 74% of the float being held by big funds like Vanguard & Blackrock which does significantly reduce the sell-off possibilities. So, this are my projections and my expectations for the company, I think Lisa SU has done a terrific job since becoming the CEO, and has driven AMD to a renewed approach to their business, as the company has been booming in the past 5 years, growing more than twice as much as Nvidia and crushing the SP500 and Intel’s performance. Thank you everyone for reading! Hope you enjoyed the content! Be sure to leave a comment down below with your opinion on the stock market! Have a great day and see you next time!
AMD DD / Stock Analysis 🚀🚀🚀 [Technical, Fundamental & DCF] & $AMD Stock Forecast [Short & Long Term]🚀🚀🚀
In this post we are going to go through an in-depth analysis of AMD🚀, we are going to take a look at their fundamental value, their DCF, do a little technical analysis and set some price targets for the near future and for the long term ~Very Long Post~ Hello everyone! Let’s start by talking a little about AMD, they are one of the biggest semiconductor companies in the world, and they operate in multiple segments like Computing, Gaming, Enterprise, Semi-Custom and many more with some of the most important products for the company being microprocessors and GPUs both for personal use like (gaming consoles & PCs) while also offering products for professional use like data centers. The company was founded more than 50 years ago and have more than 11K employees, with the company overperforming recently as they have seen a more than 80% rise in the last year. So, guys, let’s go a little through the 4th quarter & yearly results for AMD. The company reported a revenue of $3.24B in the 4th quarter, with a 53% growth since last year, while for the full year they earned almost $10B as they more than doubled they quarterly and full year net income, which resulted in a $1.29 earnings/share for the year. The company has 2 major income segments in Computing & Graphics which brought in sales of over $6.4B for the year and an operating income of $1.26B and the Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom segment which brought in $3.3B in revenues and almost $400M in operating income. They also provide an additional segment that doesn’t bring in any revenues but which represents costs that can’t be associated with any of the other 2 segments, but also includes stock-based compensations and acquisitions related costs. Both of these 2 segments have seen huge increases in the past year with operating income doubling for the computing & graphics segment and increasing by almost 50% for the EEC segment.🚀🚀 AMD didn’t have such a big capital expenditure in 2020, with only $294M but this can increase depending on the demand of their products while they also adjusted their income with $312M in depreciation & amortizations. Both of these numbers have increased by 40 to 50% in the past years and will be important in the DCF valuation. They have also managed to increase the gross profit margin to 45%, up 2% from 2019 as their earnings before interest & tax or EBIT stood at $1.37B. The company has seen a continued earnings per share growth overall, despite the first 2 quarters of 2020 coming in lower than previous, but that was to be expected as this was impacted by the reduced revenues in Q1 & Q2 before things started to pick up back again, as they finished with a huge increase overall in the 4th quarter.🚀🚀 Their product portfolio has become a great challenge to Intel’s market share and is continuing to evolve, as Intel is still struggling to regain momentum with their products.🚀 AMD announced the world’s best processors for laptop and an enterprise variant that is expected to be available in the first half of 2021. They have also launched the fastest AMD gaming graphics card ever while also working with big companies like Amazon on their AWS cloud offerings & Microsoft Azure which are planning to use their upcoming 3rd generation EPYC processors. AMD is also involved in supercomputers which indicates that they are continuing to innovate and develop products that will be in high demand for the foreseeable future🚀 The one big thing that can propel AMD even more in the future is the proposed acquisition or more rather merger with Xilinx 🚀, which also beat earnings expectations the other day, with revenues of over $800M for the quarter and a Free Cash Flow of 44% of their revenues. Xilinx has a market cap of over $32B, and the combination of the 2 companies would create synergies. They are targeting an all-stock transaction which will have implications on my projections, but as time has gone, the $35B price tag is only a 10% premium for Xilinx. The one hurdle the companies have to pass is the regulatory procedures. We will have to wait and see if the deal goes through or not, as it’s expected the deal should be finished by the end of the year, with AMD shareholders retaining 74% of the new group shares and Xilinx holding the remaining 26%. AMD also offered great guidance for 2021 as they expect the strength of their product portfolio to push AMD revenues up 37% over 2020 and also expect their gross margin to increase to 47%, while they expect an effective tax rate for next year of 15%, well belove the 21% US corporate tax rate. I have made some predictions based on the growth rate of the company, the latest plans announced by them and used some estimates and expectations. So, keep in mind this are only projections and are calculated by myself, this is not an investment advice and you should do your own research and so on… So, let’s start with the Unleveraged discounted free cash flow projections to see what the current valuation of the company is.🚀🚀🚀 I used their total revenues projections that we will discuss later on in the long-term projection and the net income for 2020 to which I added back the Depreciation & Amortization costs they had in 2020 and got to a $1.68B EBITDA. For the next years I used 1% increase in EBIT margin which I think they can achieve pretty easy and an increase in capex of 10%/year in order to maintain an increased production capacity while also applying a 15% decrease in their net working capital. So, for an 8% discount rate, which is pretty much the Average SP500 return, we get a $9.7B Discounted Free Cash Flow by 2025. Now there are 2 methods of doing the valuation, either the perpetuity method or the EBITDA multiple method, but for both of them we do have to subtract or add the net assets or debt, which in this case stands $5.75B in assets. I personally think a use of the average is better suited for most companies, though some of the companies trade largely on the EBITDA approach and other on the growth approach. If we use the growth approach, we can see that AMD is pretty fairly valued right now, as this implies a loss of 2%, while on the other hand the EBITDA multiple approach gives us a valuation of over $112, meaning an almost 30% undervaluation of the company. But as I said, I think a use of the average is best, so, my current price target for AMD in 2021 is $98.82, implying a 13.5% return from the last price. And now let’s move on to a longer-term valuation of the company based on the growth projections I have for AMD.🚀🚀🚀 For my projections I actually just used their full year results and implied different growth rates for each revenue stream. I think we can continue to see 50% growth rate in the EEC segment for 2021 and then implying a gradual slowing of their growth, while for the Computing & Graphics segment I implied a 35% growth, way lower than the over 100% they saw in 2020, also implying a gradual slowdown of the trend by 2025. I think these growth implications are pretty reasonable giving the high demand the company has seen for their entire product line, especially as gaming revenues have continued to increase, and also taking into account the need for their products in data centers, cloud usage & digital currency mining. For their cost of sales, I started from the current ones which stand at 80% for the Computing & Graphics segment and implied a 1% improvement each year, while for the EEC segment I started from the 88% expense margin right now and implied a gradual 2% improvement. I also maintained their other expense regarding to the cost of sales to 3% of their total revenues, in-line with the previous years. This means for 2025 we would get just over $33B in revenues and $26B in expenses, resulting in a gross profit of almost $7B. I also maintained the same capex as in the DCF and also substracted the interest & other expenses for which I implied a 5% annual growth, thus leading us to a $6.28B in earnings before tax. I maintained their 15% effective tax rate projections and also diluted their shares by 1% each year accounting for some dilution in the stock. So, for the $5.3B in 2025 revenues after tax and accounting for 1.27B shares, that would mean a $4.21 earnings/share, meaning the stock is trading at 20 times forward price to earnings for 2025. I like to base my future projections on Forward/PE valuations so, with the current projected PE and depending on what PE you assume for the stock between 25 and 40, the stock can trade between $105 and almost $168. 🚀🚀🚀 So, after all these estimates what are my price targets? HERE are my actual price targets🚀🚀🚀 I think the 2025 bear case price we can see AMD trade at is $115 which would imply a return of almost 33% , while my base case and my pretty safe assumption is that AMD will trade at 137$/share by the end of 2025, implying a 57% return on the current price. But my most bullish case would see the company trading at $158, which would imply a return of over 81%. So yeah guys, THIS are my Overall price targets for 2025, my bear case is an average of the 25 & 30 PE ratio, while the normal case is the average between the 30 and 35 PE’s with the most bullish case valuing the company between a PE of 35-40. So HERE is the full spreadsheet that I have projected for AMD by 2025, if you do have another opinion or a suggestion please leave a comment down below, I think I have been conservative in most of my projections, but feel free to give your opinion. I think these are pretty reasonable targets, as the semiconductors industry will keep on booming in the next decade, as the world will need more & more chips that also keep advancing in technology. The company also has very good financials, with almost $9B in assets vs just $3.1B in total liabilities, which can be easily paid by just the current assets. And let’s also take a look at what the estimates are from the analysts. We can only see EPS estimates until 2023 of $3.22, which I think is safe to say can grow an additional dollar by 2025, so my projections are pretty in-line with what other experts anticipate. So, what do I expect in the next couple of days, weeks and months for AMD? Let’s look at this CHART, the stock just broke below the long-term uptrend but has seen good support at the $86-87 levels, which is where the next support should stand. We saw AMD pushing towards $100 in the beginning of the year, but it hit major resistance once Intel also announced a change in their leadership, as they brought in the WMWare CEO Gelsinger, but it’s very hard to see him turn around Intel in a very short time. Intel will need some years & a lot of capital expenditure to turn things around, if they do manage to do it at all. AMD hasn’t been overbought since August, and currently has an RSI near 41, which is pretty oversold for a good company, so I expect to see them regaining some momentum in the near-term, but I guess the market is very busy with the current short-squeezes. AMD will se a lot of resistance breaking through the $100 level, not because of something fundamental with the company, but I guess it’s a psychological resistance rather. And let’s take a quick look at what 24 analysts on Wall Street are saying. They mostly have a buy call on the company with an average price target of $100 and a high price target of $135. So, I think the analyst are pretty spot on with AMD, but my PT are slightly lower as it’s always better to undershoot and overperform rather than the other way around. So, what would I do? Well, I own AMD stock and I believe it still has plenty of room to grow, so I would start building a position right now and add on any weakness, and I would especially buy more if the stock drops even lower than 80$.🚀🚀🚀 One last thing to mention about AMD is that they also have a very big % of their shares held by institutions, with over 74% of the float being held by big funds like Vanguard & Blackrock which does significantly reduce the sell-off possibilities. So, this are my projections and my expectations for the company, I think Lisa SU has done a terrific job since becoming the CEO, and has driven AMD to a renewed approach to their business, as the company has been booming in the past 5 years, growing more than twice as much as Nvidia and crushing the SP500 and Intel’s performance. Thank you everyone for reading🙏 Hope you enjoyed the content! Be sure to leave a comment down below with your opinion on the stock market! Have a great day and see you next time❗
BB -- Blackberry AWS -- Amazon Web Services IVY -- Intelligent Vehicles Yo. I don't actually know if this stands for anything QNX -- Quick-Unix perhaps? It's a Unix-like embedded microkernel RTOS (real-time operating system) EOY -- end of year PT -- price target SP -- stock price EV -- electric vehicle SoC -- System on a Chip IoT -- Internet of Things TL;DR: Blackberry ($BB) is almost daily announcing new partnerships and new clients for their software, including new deals with companies that are just now or just this year launching autonomous vehicles that run on QNX software. The big kahuna of all these deals is BB's recent partnership with Amazon to go 50/50 into BB's software IVY, a scalable cloud-connected software platform designed for intelligent vehicle data gathering and data sharing. With Amazon's Jeff Bezos stepping down, and Andy Jassy filling his shoes, who was the CEO of AWS, BB will have some very firm support behind Amazon's new CEO. BB and Amazon are having a webinar Feb. 23rd about their partnership and IVY, which should be a strong catalyst moving forward. IVY beta earnings are projected to begin impacting BB's Q3 or Q4 earnings beginning in November this year, with IVY fully being integrated around the 2023 timeframe. Through a lot of reading and analysis, I believe BB has a four-tiered business model dating back as far as 2013 when BB's CEO John Chen was hired to begin the massive BB turnaround process. Tier 1 was development of QNX and IVY, lasting from 2013 to today and onward, however, Tier 2 overlaps Tier 1. Tier 2 was customer acquisition, primarily distributing their secure software in QNX, SecuSuite, Spark, and AtHoc. They secured 37 automakers during this time, including 9 of the top 10 automakers, over 106 governments from around the world, including all of G7 governments and 18 of G20 governments, as well as 77% of Fortune 100 companies, including partnerships with Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Sony, XPENG, XPEV, NVIDIA, Intel, Qualcomm, Baidu, IBM, LG, Samsung, and others. Well if they have such an incredible market share, why are they so undervalued? The answer is that QNX was not the end-all-be-all product. It was the base that the rest would be built on. Particularly IVY, which is the real money-maker. Tier 3 is IVY beta, and Tier 4 is IVY distribution and subscription revenue streams. So why is IVY the big deal and not QNX? They are both big deals, but QNX was never designed to be the money-maker. They are charging a one-time fee per vehicle use. There is a bigger goal here, to secure their clients as their customers for the bigger product in IVY. They also need QNX is to be a secure system in order for IVY to be trustworthy and reliable. And it certainly is secure. QNX has ISO26262 certification, as well as US government clearance, NSA clearance, and CIA clearance. The US government uses QNX and Blackberry products. Just let that sink in. That should tell you something about its security. Anyways, IVY will be used in autonomous vehicle level 4 and level 5 communication (note that QNX is level 5 certified... it has a business moat just in its security level and clearance), as well as EV and gas vehicle data collecting and AI-powered data synthesis. See below for more details on IVY. Wrapping up this TL;DR, BB is going to do well this year as IVY unfolds, but will do even better in the next 2-5 years. I have a PT of 25 by EOY and a PT of 80 by 2023 EOY, and a PT of 160+ by 2025 EOY TL;DR: TL;DR: BB go up, but go slow for now because IVY revenue not here yet, but big fast later. Make big monies, BB is the future tech that Amazon, Microsoft, Google, etc will be building upon in the EV and IoT market
FAQs:
1) Why is Blackberry stock price going down? A: A few possible reasons. One, as of today the whole market is down. BB is connected to overall market swings as most companies are. Two, there may be some market manipulation by bearish financial institutions as there are a lot of calls expiring on 2/19. I would expect that BB SP to be volatile between $11 and $14 between now and then, and to move upwards after 2/19 and especially after 2/23 (Amazon + BB webinar). Three, there are bearish investors who still think BB is a phone company and don't understand the underworkings of BB's business strategy, their software, their patents, or their partners. Their revenue has been affected by coronavirus and has not been particularly phenomenal so far this year. 2) Should I invest now or later? A: First off, I'm not a financial advisor, these are just my opinions. Invest at your own risk. In my opinion, BB will see a large SP growth by EOY, anywhere from 50% to 150% growth by EOY. While revenue will likely not increase much this year, the partnership with Amazon and news regarding IVY will likely create new floors for their SP much higher than the current SP right now, at around the $12 SP 3) What's stopping competitors from building a similar product and hurting BB's business? A: There's a lot of reasons why BB has a huge moat right now. One, notice the partners that BB has with QNX. They've got all the big boys working them, aside from Apple and Tesla. Seeing as SpaceX runs on QNX, and seeing that Apple was trying to make a deal with Hyundai that did not go through, I think it is still possible that either Tesla or Apple or both companies could also make a deal with BB to use QNX as their OS system. BB worked to develop their QNX embedded microkernel OS for the last eight years or so. Anyone trying to step into the game now is far too late. Apple has the best chance of all companies, as it has its own OS and Apple knows security very well, but this still requires an entirely new system in order to work in the EV sector. Also, Apple announced recently that they would be developing their own EV, although they did not give much details beyond that statement. The likelihood that they are both working on the hardware and software side of this thing is slim given the large number of difficulties that come with certification as it relates to the cybersecurity software space. Regardless, I would suspect that either Apple or Tesla is the most likely to be competitors in this space, but neither company has successfully completed a certified OS system, particularly for the emerging sector of autonomous EVs. Tesla is currently building a Linux-based system that is having a lot of difficulty in passing certifications such as ISO26262, a struggle that has been ongoing for years now. They may achieve a product that passes these safety regulations and certifications, but the question remains whether this will be in time as the EV and autonomous market picks up speed, and whether competing companies would even be interested in using their product. In fact, any car company is unlikely to develop their own OS software because none of their competitors would be likely to use it. BB is the perfect business to license since it is not competing in the hardware sector for the EV market. This argument can also be used for Apple if they are also building an EV. 4) Why is BB's revenue so low if they have so many customers and partners? A: QNX has been licensed so far as a one-time purchase, per vehicle or IoT using their software. IVY will be a subscription-based software that also includes a one-time purchase. Thus, BB's revenue streams are somewhat unimpressive currently, but they are playing the long game. If my hypothesis is correct, it is John Chen's goal to lay low as software is developed and customer relationships are built. It's the same with the book market. It's the sequel that makes all the money, not the first book. QNX is just the first book of a series looking to hook in its customers with low costs before hitting 'em with the strong follow up in IVY. Additionally, in order to build a competitive business moat, it was to their advantage to not forewarn any competitors of their involvement and plans. Consider John Chen's work as a CEO in his last business Sybase. Chen worked as the CEO of Sybase for 10 years. For the first 7 years, the SP remained at around $10 a share. Three years later, the SP was at $100 a share. I suspect he is implementing a similar model with Blackberry. Chen joined Blackberry in 2013. BB stock actually dropped for most of the last 7 years, resting at a stock price of around $5. Now BB is at $12 a share. I would not be surprised if BB reaches $50 two years from now.
Blackberry Clients and Partners Automakers: Honda, Audi, Jeep, Mitsubishi, Ford, Hyundai, Volkswagen, Bentley, Lamboghini, Byton, Mini (cooper), Toyota, Subaru, Fiat Chrysler, Mazda, Nio, BMW, Porsche, Lexus, Kia, Land-Rover, Mercedes-Benz, Buick, Jaguar, Visteon, Skoda, Chevrolet, Nissan, Acura, Continental, General Motors, Baidu, Motional Other: Denso, Aptiv, Bosch, Panasonic, Harman, Bugatti, LG, Vodafone, Bell, Carahsoft, CACI, Telus, iSec, KPMG, Tableau, Qlik Major: Amazon, Google, Sony, XPENG, XPEV, Li Auto, NVIDIA, Canoo, Microsoft, Intel, Verizon, Qualcomm, IBM, LG, Samsung Major Investors: PRIMECAP, Hamblin Watsa, Ontario Teachers’ Pension, Vanguard, Harris Associates, ETF Managers Group, Wells Capital, Arrowstreet Capital, Kahn Brothers Advisors, Norges Bank Investment Governments: Albania, Andorra, Angola, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bahrain, Belarus, Belgium, Benin, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Botswana, Brazil, Brunei, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Canada, Congo, Croatia, Czech Republic, DR Congo, Denmark, Egypt, Estonia, Finland, France, Gabon, Germany, Ghana, Gibraltar, Greece, Guadeloupe, Hong Kong, Hungary, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Kuwait, Latvia, Lesotho, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macau, Macedonia, Malawi, Malaysia, Mali, Malta, Marthinique, Mauritania, Mauritus, Mayotte, Mexico, Moldova, Monaco, Montenegro, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Netherlands, Netherlands Antilles, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Oman, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, Russia, Réunion, Saint Barthélemy, Saint Martin, San Marino, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Serbia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Swaziland, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Tanzania, Thailand, Togo, Turkey, USA, Uganda, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, Uruguay, Vatican City, Western Sahara, Zambia, Zimbabwe
Blackberry Current Revenues:
BlackBerry Revenues: How Does BlackBerry Make Money? -- Trefis This display the biggest bearish argument to BB. Until IVY begins producing new revenue streams, BB is likely to not exponentially increase revenue streams, but only sustain moderate YoY growth
Blackberry Analysis Regarding Infotainment and Google and Ford Deal:
see "Blackberry (BB) Stock News Analysis | What I need to say..." by Financial Live by LEYA on the forbidden video website The media recently picked out a story that left out a lot of pertinent information, making it seems that BB lost Ford as a client. This is not true. QNX is designed to be a SoC. This means that other operating systems, such as Linux or Android, can be easily added to QNX. It is in fact encouraged. The Ford and Google deal was simply announcing the Ford would be using Android as their infotainment system. I believe that BB was never intended to try and be the predominant entity for all software systems in EVs or IoTs, but the backbone that connects all together, and to protect all components in a secure system. Autonomous EVs and even regular EVs in general would not be possible without a secure system protecting the product, as is true with IoTs. This is also why things like US Fighter Jets run on... you guess it, QNX. Ford is still using QNX. It is simply also now using Android that is running on top of QNX more commentary on this: Analyzing Blackberry Bear Argument - Case No. 1: Ford Deal
Image This is an interesting one to be sure. Facebook was being evil, like the do, and were caught using a number of BB patents. They settled in February, and the day that the settlement was finalized, John Chen (BB CEO) tweeted reminding everyone that BB is used on the ISS https://twitter.com/JohnChen/status/1358853064153784321?s=20 Well, the connection and speculation here is that Blackberry is going to the moon, and that the settlement is rather significant. Someone else also dug out some information in Facebook's most recent 10-K, specifically a portion for a 'non-cancelable contractual commitment' of an amount of $7500 million dollars. That's 7.5 billion btw. We don't know how big the settlement is, but it is worth noting that BB's entire market cap is 7.5B. I highly doubt that a settlement would reach such lofty numbers, but it could be possible that FB settled for some initial amount of $1B or so, as well as $1B in reoccurring payments over several years. We won't know until March 15th actually, so stay tuned.
Blackberry New Partnerships
Within the last few weeks, Blackberry has announced a stronger partnership with Baidu (China's Google), as well as their involvement with Baidu choosing to use QNX for their autonomous vehicles that will be hitting the road, as early as this year and next. BB has also announced their involvement with Motional, a joint venture between Hyundai and Aptiv, which will use QNX for their autonomous vehicles. Motional will be partnering with Lyft to use autonomous vehicles to begin serving customers and will be deploying their vehicles in 2023. It was also announced that QNX will be working with AOSP (Android Open Source Project), as well as announcing yesterday that QNX Hypervisor 2.2 is now released, which is what allows Android and Linux to run on top of QNX. A sum-up of all the recent news on $BB
Rumor: Blackberry Buyout? Here's why that's not happening:
Just read this post. It's quite revealing: Great Day for BB despite stick dipping. TL;DR: Amazon could have easily bought BB. Why didn't they? Well, all the big players are interested in this EV and IoT emerging sector. This is the new wave of technology that will dominate the market. First we had the dot.com boom, then the cell-phone and smart-phone market, and now we have the autonomous EV and IoT market. If Amazon were to buy BB, they would have to submit a tender offer. This would be a red flag to all the big players that Amazon were trying to buy up the best security out there. It would be a bidding war that could result in a double-digit multi-billion dollar buyout. It was much more to their advantage to create a secret alliance with BB and establish a 50/50 partnership, whose contract includes exclusivity for their use of IVY. Ouch! That's gotta hurt. This is where the importance of QNX lies. BB will be able to pull the rug out from any company that chooses to use something other than IVY. No IVY, no QNX, no EV. It will be a package deal where IVY is the big money maker. All other companies will have to build from the ground up or be forced to license QNX and make their money off of other sectors, such as the infotainment sector, as Google has already begun to do with the Ford deal. When this deal happened, the other big boys wet their pants realizing they needed to get into this space, and fast. Microsoft partnered with Cruise/GM. Apple tried to partner with Hyundai, who was so flattered, they may have initially said yes or indicated so, before realizing that they were already partnered with BB, so it was a no-go. Not sure if that is fact or fiction, but it is an interesting proposal.
Blackberry IVY + AWS Partnership:
Alright, so what's the deal with IVY? Why is it going to be so profitable? Why is IVY the real money-maker, while QNX has been used as the customer-acquisition software tool? Check out this picture: Image For one, IVY is designed for real-time communication between EVs or other IoTs. Autonomous driving level 5 requires vehicles to communicate with one another. This is where IVY comes in. IVY connects the different software components of an EV (which presumably are running on QNX), as well as harvesting data on those systems. The data used can be distributed for a wide-variety of uses, including, but not limited to, automakers and suppliers, app developers, consumer services, smart cities, EV charging providers, insurance companies, and vehicle maintenance providers. All of these different sectors will be willing to pay subscriptions for these data services, as well as the automakers and IoT makers who will also be willing to pay subscriptions for IVY. For instance, IVY can help share information between vehicles that will allow for a car detecting ice roads in one area so that other cars using IVY can take a different route. This results in less crashes, which helps the automakers. Insurance companies can use data from all these different data points as well, allowing them an inside-view of their clients. The list of what is possible here is inexhaustible. As for price points, the subscription models for multiple outside companies wanting to use the data will be create huge revenue streams for BB. With Amazon as a 50/50 partner, and with their resources and strategic management, BB will be poised to be the foundation in security and data sharing for the entire EV, and somewhat of the IoT market (the IoT market has more competitors for sure) see "Is BlackBerry Stock Undervalued?" by Wealthy Mindset on the forbidden video website see "Roadmap to $180 a share (BlackBerry Stock)" by Wealthy Mindset on the forbidden video website
Revenue, revenue, revenue...
Blackberry is poised to be an industry leader in EV, government, and IoT security and data sharing with products such as QNX, IVY, Spark, and their other software products. Stock price will likely stay somewhat stunted until IVY revenue begins picking up. It is possible that more announcements and marketing related to IVY will make this growth more rapid. In my opinion, either way BB over the next 5 years will 10x. The question is whether you want to get in now at $12 / share or two years from now at $40 a share or something similar, assuming that either way this stock is going to push for that 100B market cap (it's currently at 7B). There will be bearish analysts that will continue to say that Blackberry is a worthless company until those IVY revenue streams begin to come in. It is also possible that a realistic competitor may emerge within the next three years, such as Tesla or Apple. But if Apple is seeking to create its own EV product, then both companies will have a hard time finding any way to license their software to any other company. It remains possible that Apple and/or Tesla may strikes deals with BB as well in order to be able to produce autonomous vehicles and get a bite of that market share
Really, no competitors?
Well it's called a business moat for a reason. As we have recently seen, QNX is working with AOSP, and so clearly, they are not to be worried about. Tesla is not a true competitor as their OS product is not certified yet, and has demonstrated difficulty in doing so, and additionally, other automakers will not want to benefit their competitors by using their product. A third-party non-auto-maker will be much more desirable. Other companies such as VxWorks, have a lot of to prove both in security and certifications, as well as producing an OS product that is compatible with an emerging autonomous level 5 EV market. QNX's embedded microkernel RTOS is very much unique in this regard. This type of system allows for real-time processing and power distribution, while protecting the system from attacks. In an embedded microkernel system, if one part of the system is attacked, the whole system will not shut down, in layman's terms. This is essential for the security of any high-risk product that is built upon an underlying software that controls that different components of the system.
Conclusion:
All eyes are turned towards Blackberry right now. People want to know what this deal with Amazon will look like, how it will work, what they will focus on, (will Amazon also use this system for a fleet of delivery drones? hmmm), what the revenue streams will look like, what are their projections, what markets and sectors are they targeting, what are their future goals, what will Amazon be doing on their end, etc, etc. The Amazon + BB webinar may answer some of those questions, or maybe they won't. Time will tell (Feb. 23rd, specifically -- here's a link to sign up and watch: Next-Gen Vehicle Architectures Unlock Unprecedented Opportunities for Automakers). Also look out for that FB settlement numbers on March 15th, and Q4 earnings March 31st. I don't expect Q4 earnings to be particularly interesting unless they include the FB settlement numbers. Could those numbers instead be put into Q1 earnings for 2021? Possibly. Initially IVY beta is expected to begin being released late this year. I will also be looking forward to see how Apple and Tesla respond in the coming months. Ultimately, BB is a long-term play, but is poised to dominate this emerging industry with the partnerships and security focused software they have secretly been building. Now if only the could do something about their logo, some rebranding would be nice... This is not financial advice, just my own opinions. I am not a financial advisor nor a professional. I own 14k shares in Blackberry, as well as options (10x 8/17/21 20c BB). Do your own DD and fact check me as well
GME - EndGame Part 2: Cohen, Market Cap, Potential Investors
Hello again folks. This is an extension of my DD last week in which I shared some research on short positions, GME’s debt, and some speculation on institutional investing. Since that post, GME is up 75% and there’s been lots of good bullish / bearish DD on the short term. In this post, I’m going to cover 3 topics, focusing on the mid-to-long term prospects for GME: 1) Cohen, 2) GME’s market cap potential, and 3) potential investors that could continue to pile in. TL:DR; You need to think about GME differently. Not as a trader. Not as an investor. You need to think like a venture capitalist. This is an unprecedented opportunity, and the first time I’ve gone all-in - I’m more bullish now than when the stock was trading sub $15. If you’re in GME you need to get in with conviction otherwise you’re going to lose by selling when it drops.
Quick aside - my history and positions:
I’ve been a passive investor for many years. This is literally the first time I’ve taken an interest in becoming an active investor. I opened an RH account in August to start speculating on GME. My first post called out some cheap lottery plays that took my speculating account from $5K - $20K in 3 weeks. I’ve since posted a few times on GME, even trying to tell you to buy the post-earnings dip, and added more to my active trading accounts. I’ve taken $10K -> $130K on RH and $230K -> $480K in IBKR since slowly adding to GME since September. UPDATE: I have deleted my positions in this post - will explain why in my next post. I'm still holding. All that being said, thus far I’ve been thinking about GME as a trade - trying to get in at the lowest cost I could for the maximum upside on a near-term exit, but I’ve switched completely into thinking of GME is a ridiculously asymmetric investment with massive potential in the next 2-3 year timeframe - even at $35. Even at $45, $50, $60. That’s why I added roughly 2500 shares on Friday at around $36 despite adding very cautiously when GME was below $20. I’m also completely all-in on RH with options (mostly deep ITM, a few fds) - $0 buying power left. Grab a drink, sit down. Let me tell you why I’ve gotten more aggressive, and probably why you shouldn’t worry about what price you pay right now, as long as you’re willing to believe and hold.
About Cohen (and friends)
From the recent 8K about the board changes (which you should definitely read if you’re putting serious money in): As part of the Agreement, RC Ventures has agreed tocustomary standstill provisions*, which provide that from the date of the Agreement until the earlier of (a) the date that is 30 calendar days prior to the deadline for the submission of director nominations by stockholders for the Company’s* 2022annual meeting of stockholders and (b) the date that is 120 days prior to the first anniversary of the 2021 Annual Meeting (such period, the “Standstill Period”), RC Ventures willnot, among other things: (i) acquire beneficial ownership in, or aggregate economic exposure to, directly or indirectly, more than 19.9%of the Company’s outstanding common stock; (ii) make any proposal for consideration by stockholders at any annual or special meeting of stockholders of the Company; (iii) make any offer or proposal with respect to any extraordinary transactions; or (iv) seek, alone or in concert with others, the appointment, election or removal of any directors in opposition to any recommendation of the Board, in each case as further described in the Agreement. As part of the Agreement, the Company has permitted RC Ventures to acquire, whether in a single transaction or multiple transactions from time to time, additional shares of the Company’s common stock to the extent such acquisitions would result in RC Ventures having beneficial ownership of less than 20.0% of the outstanding shares, without triggering the restrictions that would otherwise be imposed under Section 203 of the Delaware General Corporation Law (the “DGCL”), and RC Ventures has agreed that upon acquiring beneficial ownership 20.0% or more of the outstanding shares of the Company’s common stock, the restrictions under Section 203 of the DGCL would apply to a potential business combination with RC Ventures as an “interested stockholder” (as defined in Section 203 of the DGCL). This is critical: This agreement was the result of a negotiation between Cohen and the existing board.
After his activist letter calling out the board and then 13D buy after the earnings dip rocketed the stock up from 12 -> 20, it was clear to everyone that RC was the reason GME’s stock was heading up. The GME board was afraid of a hostile takeover / losing their jobs. This agreement allowed Cohen and 2 others on the board as long as he didn’t attempt a hostile takeover.
Cohen wants it all. In the activist letter, he publicly said “no” to just one board seat. He then publicly bought more as soon as Sherman threatened a shelf offering to dilute him below 10%.
Alan Attal - the previous COO and CMO of Chewy (2011 - 2018)
Jim Grube - the previous CFO of Chewy (2015 - 2018)
He’s not fucking around folks. He wants to build another Chewy, and he’s bringing the people who helped him do it the first time to do it again. As a result of the agreement, he’s limited to buying up to 20% of shares until 2022. Why not 13%? Simple - Cohen wants the option to buy more. He’s not happy with a single board seat; he’s not going to settle for simply getting added to the board; and he’s not going to settle for 13% ownership. Also, remember that Alan and Jim have 💲 to buy in as well. I haven't seen their holdings yet. Their time is worth more than their money and they've already decided to put their time in.
Cohen is not an exec - he’s a founder with an all-in mentality
“When I find things I have a lot ofconvictionin, I goall-in*.”*
Cohen is a founder that has gone through the successful creation of a startup. When you are startup founder, most of your NW is tied to equity in your company. You are trained to have skin in the game. You’re not allowed to think you have a safety net. You give up years of your life and bet everything because you have to believe in what you’re doing. Founders typically have 30-50% ownership of their company.
“Cohen uses the word “conviction” a lot. He says it’s something he learned from his father, who ran a glassware importing business in Montreal where Cohen grew up. “He taught me how to block the noise from the masses,” says Cohen. “To have a point of view and have conviction and not waver.”
He only sold Chewy rather taking it to IPO because of his Dad’s health. He cut his entrepreneurial career short and he’s itching to get back in.
Cohen sold Chewy for $3.35B, with estimates stating he personally walked away with about $600M after taxes.
Cohen has a lot of capital to buy more. After selling Chewy, he went all-in on Apple & WFC, which as of June was up 40%.
“ Cohen says his portfolio, when including dividends and a few other stock holdings, has returned more than 40% over the past 3 years, beating the market.”
Aapl was his largest holding, andis up another 50% since June 5 when the Bloomberg article was published.
Cohen lives in FL - with no income or capital gains for individuals, unlike other founders who live in CA which taxes all cap gains as ordinary income.
I’m going to estimate his net worth (minus his GME holdings) is around $800M-$1B.
Cohen’s 9,001,000 (it’s over 9000! 🐲🏐) shares have thus far been purchased at something like an average of $12/share, for a total investment of around $110M.
So Cohen has put in $110M out of his $1B into GME. Does that sound like he’s all-in? Absolutely fucking not. Cohen’s going to buy up to the max he can this year (20%), likely by selling some other holdings prior to cap gains tax law changes. He can add more next year after the standstill period is done.
What will lead to Cohen’s next purchase of GME
Thus far, every RC purchase has been about sending a message.
Prior to Q3 earnings, his purchases were signaling an intent to the board that he was serious about wanting to get involved. He also rubbed it in their faces that the stock price was largely appreciating because of him. From the activist letter:
“We recognize that the Board may feel it is insulated from stockholder scrutiny after adding new directors this past spring and seeing a recent stock price uptick (which only came on the heels of RC Ventures filing its 13D)” (what a fucking burn).
If there was any doubt about RC’s impact on the stock price, it was put to rest after Q3’s earnings, where the current leadership’s hubris and threat of diluting RC led to a drop of almost 30%. RC then bought the dip, shoved it in their faces, and the market GME again rocketing GME to 20 in a massive post-earnings recovery. Message sent again - “The market wants me. Let me the fuck in.”
Now that Cohen and the Chewy folks are on the board, he’s going to angle for CEO. He’s not looking to advise GME. He wants to go all-in, to run GME. He’s holding the optionality of buying more based on the success of his attempt to take over GME through non-hostile means.
If you see Cohen buy more GME, he’s sending another message. This time it’s because it’s clear to him he’s going to be CEO and wants to max his skin in the game. If you see Cohen buy, it’s “CEO talks going well” - you fucking buy.
GME’s market cap potential
Cohen sees a $200BN+ total addressable market cap for gaming by 2023. For contrast, Chewy was playing in the pet food/supplies market, which has a total addressable market (TAM) of under $50BN annually. GME’s potential is at base 4x that of Chewy. This does not even account for the pc gaming hardware market, which is another $35BN+.
Chewy’s market cap is $44BN on $6BN of annual revenue.
In other words, even if you give GME’s physical locations no value, GME’s ecommerce business is growing 5x faster than Chewy and already has 75% of online revenue. Summary: Chewy is priced > 7X times its annual total revenue. GME is priced at .45 its annual ecommerce revenue, despite GME having 5-6 greater TAM and growing its ecommerce business 5X as fast Chewy. What. The. Fuck. I’ve never seen a stock more mispriced. People talking about $100 price targets are suffering from a fucking lack of imagination. Even if you completely discount
An asset is only worth what someone else is willing to pay for it, right? So are the potential buyers of this growing company? Here’s a list in decreasing order of likelihood.
Elon (Least likely, completely improbable, but cataclysmic event). Elon hates shorts. Elon, with TSLA, went through the pain that GME is going through. TSLA almost went bankrupt because shorts were pushing the price down so it was difficult to raise the cash they needed to survive. Sound familiar? Elon’s wealth swings more in a day than GME is worth in entirety. Elon could buy all the fucking float of GME with what he makes in 8 hours. One call from fellow entrepreneur and aspiring twitter-meme-god would absolutely wreck the game.
If you are short gamestop, you are one meme purchase by the richest man in the world away from a fucking cataclysmic event. "Hey son, I heard you like games. So I bought you gamestop. All of it." 🚀
Buffett (More likely, still improbable). I’m actually amazed that while Buffett & co were lamenting that there are no interesting stocks to invest in and moving to cash, that they absolutely missed the boat on GME while it was at its lows. It’s a complete value play right up his alley (in a business he can understand). My only hypothesis here is that the market cap is too small and he could not make a meaningful investment. Once GME grows to a more respectable market cap ($10b+) I can see Buffett stepping in and making an investment.
Cohen’s connections. (Highly likely if Cohen is CEO). This is the big one. And I mean absolutely nail in the coffin re-pricing of GME for the foreseeable future. Go read this Harvard Business Review piece on Cohen specifically on how Cohen puts importance on raising money and the people that backed him.
Look, I’ve started a startup before in the valley (unsuccessfully unfortunately). However, you don’t start a company without making a shit-ton of venture capitalist & angel investor connections. Cohen has stated that when pitching Chewy he was rejected by over 100 investors. I can absolutely-fucking-guarantee you that every single one of them remembers their mistake and would not miss the opportunity to invest in Cohen again. And don’t forget all of the investors who DID invest with Cohen and reaped the benefits with Chewy. While venture capitalists don’t generally make investments in public equities, this is a truly unique situation. Cohen is treating this like a rebirth, a new venture bootstrapped from GME’s bones. If VCs as a firm will not invest, you can bet your ass that those individuals will throw their personal money at Cohen. However this only happens if he’s CEO. As soon as he’s CEO, a single long weekend trip to the valley might mean 100+ investor meetings with the strategic pitch.
My biggest fear here is that VCs/PE band to take the company private at some small multiple (2-3x) and then reap the benefits while Cohen turns the company around only to re-list it to us 5 years down the road at 30X the valuation.
Thus far, it’s been us retail retards vs the wall street shorts. HFs shorting this thing have the advantage in both tactics and capital. However, if Silicon Valley money starts pouring money into this the game is over. You cannot believe the amount of money that gets thrown into startups with 90% of it burning up into thin air. $3B market cap? That’s nothing. Folks with Silicon Valley money & risk tolerance would have no problem betting on a serial entrepreneur making something amazing out of a company that already has a customer base, revenue, distribution - all in the same business (e-commerce) the entrepreneur already proved themselves in.
You, and every other retard that believes. Look, this was my point at the beginning. You need to think like a VC here. VCs are the ultimate YOLO autists making million dollar bets and not seeing a penny of it for years. They are the ultimate 💎✋🤚. You need to decide if you have conviction for the long term and then buy in. 💎✋🤚 doesn’t mean selling at $100. It doesn’t means selling at $200. It means not selling at all this year no matter the price, and at least until you learn for sure whether Cohen is the new CEO. It means believing so hard that you 20-100X your investment in 2 years when the market wakes up to the ridiculous mispricing.
Remember that if Cohen is elected CEO he can (and likely will) buy more than a 20% stake in 2022.
I’ve put every dollar I can into shares in IBKR, minus some April calls. I hold no covered calls except for some call spreads I had in RH prior to recent bump. I have April calls because I will put more cash into GME after taxes are done, and I know much cash I have to use. Calls let me cap the price I would have to pay now. This is personal research. Do your own DD. A wiser investor than me gave the advice of “Don’t aim to maximise profit, minimize regret.” If you’re not in GME yet, ask yourself how you would truly feel if what everyone here is saying panned out to be true, and you weren’t participating. Oh, and of course: 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀 Update 1: I'm still holding today, but I realized I made a pretty big mistake on the ecommerce revenue analysis. GME's 2019 e-commerce revenue was 1.35B (not 1.35B for the quarter), so divide my price target by 4 - $125/share or $8B market cap.
DDDD - Why GME Might 🚀🌝 Next Week, and How It Could Trigger a Financial Crisis
In today's edition of DDDD (Data-Driven DD), we’ll be going over over the details about what happened this week with GME, the drama around Robinhood and other brokers, and take a close look at some data to determine whether or not GME and other various meme / high SI stocks such as AMC, BBBY, FIZZ, LGND, and BB will continue 🚀🚀🚀in its short squeeze this week, and how this all could lead to widespread stock market crash and financial crisis. But first, something to cover my ass for the SEC investigators combing through this Subreddit Disclaimer - This is not financial advice, and a lot of the content below is my personal opinion and for ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY. In fact, the numbers, facts, or explanations presented below could be wrong and be made up and with some satire thrown in. Don't buy random options because some person on the internet says so. Do your own research and come to your own conclusions on what you should do with your own money, and how levered you want to be based on your personal risk tolerance.
What Exactly Happened at Robinhood This Week?
There has been plenty of speculation this week about what exactly went down and unverified (although reasonable) rumors on why Robinhood did this. I’ll go over the top two theories before taking a deep dive into the “official” reason given by Robinhood. Pressure from the White House and Sequoia according to a Robinhood employee This statement has been refuted by Sequoia. I personally wouldn’t believe the Sequoia part since I don’t really know what they would gain from it - they’re a Venture Capital firm, not a hedge fund, and would not be actively shorting stocks let alone be trading in stocks. It could be possible that the White House, or someone from the government did contact Robinhood - actually, I’d be pretty shocked if no one called them at some point this week to ask wtf was going on.During this call, they may have been afraid that GameStop’s short squeeze would have triggered a major financial crisis due to hedge funds collapsing and de-grossing, causing a mass selloff similar to what was seen in 2008 and in March 2020 - I’ll talk more about this later. Basically, without Robinhood shutting down GME from being bought, it’s actually very possible we would have seen the rest of the stock market collapse last week, and this was something the Biden administration was trying to make sure didn’t happen in the first month in office. Possible intervention from Citadel Securities This was a theory I personally believed in initially and would have been a very obvious area of scrutiny for many people. The most straightforward one being the fact that Citadel (the hedge fund) dumped a few billion into Melvin to bail it out a few days ago, who were the very well known shorts of GME. Citadel, the hedge fund, is owned by Citadel LLC, which happens to also run Citadel Securities - a market maker. If you don’t know what this is, go grow a few brain wrinkles and read my previous post about this. Citadel Securities is effectively Robinhood’s sugar daddy, directly being responsible for around 40% of their revenue in 2018 through their payment for order flow (i.e. selling your trades to Citadel, giving them the right of first refusal, and potentially giving you a worse price; this is how they get 0% commission trades btw). Theoretically, Citadel the hedge fund and Citadel the market maker is run independently and sister companies both owned by Citadel LLC, but anyone can see this being a potential conflict of interest. There’s also a possibility that Citadel Securities losing billions of dollars being short so many GME calls (they write 99% of all options contracts) and probably not being perfectly Gamma and (especially) Vega hedged, so when those two greeks skyrocketed on GME they probably lost tons of money there. According to WSB hero Chamath, he didn’t invest in Robinhood when they came to him on multiple occasions because he thought the founders lacked integrity, implying he believes they might have been the type of people to sell out their users (granted, they already literally do this) and do this type of shit. The Official Reason - Clearing House Limitations Let’s get to the official reason put out by Robinhood, which is that their clearing house, in this case the Depository Trust & Clearing Corp, suddenly increased their collateral requirements on GME trades drastically. Apparently, Robinhood is running out of cash, so they weren’t able to provide the cash collateral demanded by DTCC, and hence weren’t able to trade through them. Let’s dumb this down and talk about how brokerages work. Let’s talk about what a clearing house is and how they work. Imagine Bob wants to sell Dylan a share of GME. There’s a bunch of legal paperwork and logistics for actually transferring over the share, which can take a few days to finalize - this is called settlement. However, you don’t want people being able to back out of this exchange during this process for obvious reasons, so that’s where the clearing house comes in. Let’s call this clearing house Mary. What Mary does is facilitate (clear) this exchange, and ensures both Bob and Dylan follow through with their trade by having them both immediately give Mary cash as collateral while the exchange settles. If one party was no longer able to meet their end of the exchange (eg. Dylan goes bankrupt), Mary acts as an insurer and is responsible for buying the share from Bob instead. If it turned out that Bob was lying about actually owning a share and can't transfer it over to Dylan in time (failure to deliver), Mary is responsible for finding that share for him instead. Since GME suddenly became very volatile, and the financial soundness of some parties and their ability to deliver their side of the trade have been suddenly called into question (at least on the seller’s side), DTCC decided (...or due to pressure from other sources?) to increase the collateral needed for buying GME to be more than 10x of the proportion of the market value of whatever it was before. Most brokerages reacted to this by disabling margin trading. For some reason, Robinhood went one step further and disabled trading for all accounts, possibly due to their relatively small cash reserves compared to places like Fidelity, and the relatively large number of users who use margin in the platform.
What’s Robinhood Going To Do About GME?
Robinhood’s decision to stop purchases of GME basically got hate from literally everyone, to the point where it somehow united the country in a beautiful way. Here’s a list of things that happened as a result of Robinhood’s decision, for fun
Clearly, this decision has single-handedly made Robinhood the most hated company in the world right now. It’s especially bad given the optics - their mission is to literally “democratize finance”, with the idea of empowering individual retail investors to be on the same level of institutions. This decision, whether intentional or not, has literally gone against everything about Robinhood’s image and mission, and will end the company if not fixed soon. All of this right as Robinhood is planning to launch their IPO. The people in charge of Robinhood likely know all of this and are doing everything they can to find cash and liquidity to put up the collateral needed to resume GME trading. So far we’ve seen them raise $1B from investors and $500M through lines of credit overnight, although based on the fact that GME is still restricted, that doesn’t seem to be enough. However, in my personal opinion, I think it's likely that Robinhood is doing everything they can to find more money given the situation, and once they do, they will likely re-enable trading on GME. If that happens (which IMO will probably be some time next week), GME and all other high-SI stocks will absolutely 🚀🌝**.**
How GME Almost Caused (and Still Can Cause) a Stock Market Crash
Let’s go over something else interesting that went on as a result of the GME short squeeze - the fact that it started to affect the stock market overall. In fact, the stock market had the largest decline since October across all sectors on Wednesday when GME, AMC, and other high-SI stocks surged, with a very sharp recovery as the meme stocks fell after Robinhood suspending purchases; this was one of the biggest de-grossing of hedge funds in history. Chamath wrote a great Twitter thread about this, so amazing that I’ll just copy-paste his tweets rather than try to explain it better myself.
A children's book explanation of what's happening: 1. If you are "smart money" you are allowed to take your $1 and leverage it up to $15+ 2. You can now buy $15 of stock AND if you promise to short companies, you can short $15 of stock as well 3. In finance language, this means that you are $30 "gross" ($15 of longs + $15 of shorts) but $0 net (+$15 of longs -$15 of shorts). This makes everyone feel good because it feels like you are taking zero risk...but in reality, your $1 is exposed to $30 of risk. 4. Now you go around and tell your friends about both your longs and your shorts and when you do it at a restaurant vs on Reddit, its called an "ideas dinner". 5. You also publish your longs on a quarterly lag via an SEC rule. You don't have to tell anyone about your shorts. 6. Now the less cool people who weren't invited to the ideas dinners, start copying your longs based on your report. 7. You realize that publicizing your shorts is also a good idea so instead of only selling stocks, you also BUY options (puts) which has to be reported. 8. Now everyone can see both your longs and your shorts and if you have a hot hand, you can likely predict that the cool people from the dinner as well as the less cool people monitoring your filings will copy you. 9. But then an outsider notices that the math is way off! 10. Apparently, some of these shorts that you own represent more than 100% of the entire stock of the company. Huh? 11. So he grabs his chicken fingers and champagne and buys, starts a massive short squeeze. 12. Other's see what's happening and they jump in. 13. Now a massive short squeeze starts. You have to cover your shorts ASAP. But the banks also notice that you don't have enough credit to cover the $30 they lent you and ask for more collateral. You now also have to sell your long positions. 14. What happens next is that a cascade of short covering and long selling starts driving some stocks to the moon and others way down. Which stocks went up? Basically the ones that were the most heavily shorted by you and your buddies in the first place.
Hedge fund grossing / de-grossing In other words, as stocks like GME go up, the highly-leveraged hedge funds that are shorting these stocks are forced to sell their longs as they cover their shorts. Most retail investors are limited to 2x leverage, but since hedge funds are “hedged” by taking short and long positions, they can be up to 30x levered since theoretically they would be shielded from external events that cause all stocks to go up or down in price (i.e. Beta neutral), so they’re “safer”. To get out of these short positions, they will need to massively unwind their long positions as well so they can still have a reasonable “Net Exposure”, triggering a sell-off in those stocks. A very similar thing actually happened in March (with risk-parity) causing hedge funds to similarly massively de-gross, and literally everything from GLD to even AMZN’s stock price dropping as a result, even though theoretically COVID-19 would’ve been good for both from a fundamental basis, as we saw later on. It’s very likely that if Robinhood hadn’t stopped purchases of GME, many more hedge funds shorts would have had their shorts blow up and be forced to continue to de-gross causing a widespread stock market crash, potentially being the catalyst for finally popping the decade-long liquidity (leverage)-fueled asset bubble we’ve been experiencing. In fact, this could still happen since it doesn’t look like hedge funds have learned their lesson and are still heavily short GME with Net Shares Shorts barely moving this weekaccording to S3 Partners. Furthermore, despite seeing the largest de-grossing of hedge funds since 2009, gross exposure (aka leverage) of hedge funds still remainsclose to record-high levels. TLDR In case your attention span was too short to read everything above,
Robinhood is going to be doing everything they can to raise cash to resume GME purchases, when this happen GME 🚀🌝
Much of the stock market’s value is held by over-leveraged hedge funds, so if GME (and other common shorts) 🚀🌝 the rest of the stock market might collapse around it (EDIT - as hedge funds re-consider their long / short strategy), triggering a financial crisis
Now, just to be clear, buying GME right now is joining a game of hot potato; the longer you hold the potato the more tendies you get to eat for dinner, but at some point this will all blow up and when it does someone will be the bagholder - and right now everyone is rooting for these bagholders to be the hedge funds that are short GME. That being said, with Short Interest barely moving this week, this day of reckoning doesn’t look like it’ll be coming in the next few days and for reasons mentioned above, it’s probably more likely for GME to reach $1K next week than the probability that it’ll fall below $100. Or in other words, I like these stocks. EDIT - Appearently S3 Partners just contradicted their tweet on Friday and now indicate that shares short of GME have dipped below 30M shares. Still highly shorted compared to most other stocks, fwiw. EDIT2 - Getting alot of questions on how one short position in a small cap can do this, and my answer is that GME alone wouldn't cause a financial crisis, but rather what GME represents, which is disproving that hedge funds that a long / short strategy (i.e. taking out additional leverage to short similar companies they long) is unviable; The word from my hedge fund friends is that this type of thing would have been considered a six-sigma event, or one in a billion chance of happening; which is obviously no longer true. Hedge funds seeing Melvin go down will probably start re-consider their short books. This on mass will cause a mass short-covering and also sell-off of their longs. Hedge funds levering up using cheap money has been the basis of the stock market's rise the past year - how do you think money magically goes from Powell's money printer to the stock market?
Hello fellow retards I know these are difficult times for this sub and it’s almost impossible to post something solid which is not about the current meme stocks. Instead of jerking to some porn i did some research on PLTR and want to share my DD with you. This might be a longer text for your love dopamine level so maybe you should grab some your Adderall before. The following text might you give your eyes aids since English isn’t my native language. I will try my best. Palantir as a Company – the beginnings PLTR was founded by some people and one of them is Peter Thiel who worked alongside with our holy papa Elon at PayPal. As a payment-service they had concerns about money laundering and founded PLTR to tackle this issue early. The CIA also funded PLTR (they are always funding stuff like this – Siri as example). This actually might be the reason why people think that PLTR is a company which aggregates data and do data analysis for the government….but this is not accurate and not correct at all if you see the big picture. I will explain this point later. You retard still reading? Nice here some rocket emoji’s to pump your dopamine and keep you happy. 🚀🚀🚀 Let’s start with the DD First of all my POV is looking for a midterm to long term investment in PLTR. My valuation considers PLTRs current state and predicting from now on for the next few years.
1. The Management
Before I start with the product I rather start with the management. You can sell the nicest thing in the world. I can guarantee you that the product definitely won’t be considered as the nicest thing after a while if you have a shitty management (Intel). With Peter Thiel on the leaderboard we got a competent asshole and CEO is Alex carp (co-founder) Peter Thiel is well known and Alex Karp is one of us. He yolod his heritage into some business and become a chad. Seriously tho, I trust Peter and if Peter holds on Alex since Decades so do I. Peter proved so many times how cunning he is and showed how to pick adapt problems early and create solutions.
2. PLTR Business model/ products
Before we understand how important PLTRs products are we have to understand that we are simpeltons who don’t have any business with PLTRs. We create data. We don’t fuck with it. We creating with using our phones or working in the office. Only a few of us may working with accumulated big data. PLTRs customers’ base isn’t neighbor Joe or Aunt Nancy. The products they offer are not even for midcap companies they are more designed for whole industries and governments. That’s the reason why their products aren’t so tangible for many people. PLTR basically offers systems to big companies/governments which import their data into these systems. PLTR doesn’t sends workers to the client to collect data and analyse it. They sell platforms. They got 2 Products called “Gotham” and “Foundry” You may think wtf is this guy talking about? Let me explain it in 2 examples: First example is Syria with Gotham. It was impossible in the country to know who the good guys are and who the bad ones are. I know u muricans only know yourself and the rest of the world is the “rest of the world” for you. But this wasn’t so simple in Syria you had many factions with different intentions and some of them were allies and some of them were enemies. The lack of information or the ability of recognizing and sorting these information’s are crucial in a war. PLTR solved the struggle with creating a map which provided resilient information for the marines so they can operate safely. Civil problems over there could also be fixed. https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/10/04/palantir-using-big-data-to-solve-big-humanitarian-crises/ Actually what the John Hopkins University does with the covid numbers and the map, is some sort of what PLTR offering with their solutions. There are rumors that the tracking of Covid and the vaccination will be done by PLTR. In their S1 Form PLTR describes it this way “Gotham, our first software platform, was constructed for analysts at defense and intelligence agencies. They were hunting for needles not in one, but in thousands of haystacks. And they did not have the software they needed to do their jobs. In Afghanistan and Iraq, soldiers were mapping networks of insurgents and makers of roadside bombs by hand. Gotham enables users to identify patterns hidden deep within datasets, ranging from signals intelligence sources to reports from confidential informants, and helps U.S. and allied military personnel find what they are looking for.” https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgadata/1321655/000119312520230013/d904406ds1.htm#rom904406_11 The second example is about “Foundry” and it’s directly from the S1 File of PLTR (page 121) “An Airbus A350, for example, has five million parts and is built by hundreds of teams that are spread across four countries and more than eight factories. Companies routinely struggle to manage let alone make sense of the data involved in large projects. Foundry was built for them. The platform transforms the ways in which organizations interact with information by creating a central operating system for their data.” Both of these systems solving big issues with less effort. The arms industry as example would took billions for drones and stuff in Syria for the same job. The important fact is that PLTR does not spend so much resources for new clients they only have to provide access and support for their services and the client feeding the “machine” with data. The key point is to understand that PLTR benefits very huge from economy of scales. This is very important since their costs for additional revenue is basically flat while the profits growing exorbitant with new customers. They offer a software and platforms and not kind of services where they need man power. All they do is working on their platforms and improving it. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-palantir-ipo-breakingviews-idUSKCN26E3I2
I could spam some multiplication on revenue or even a DCF but I think it’s not necessary. Expect the costs of research and development (maybe marketing) the costs of PLTR stood mostly flat in the last quarters. It’s a growth stock and the pricing is mostly in the perspective of PLTR. This is actually all we need to know that the revenue increases while the costs staying mostly flat. Check out the balance sheets at page 12 on the S Form 1. Let’s talk about the market. The whole market seems overpriced but it isn’t tbh. Due to the low cost of capital there is no alternative than to throwing your money on stocks or on real estate. There is nothing with a solid interest rate around (not even in emerging markets). At the stock exchange like in 70s, the companies had to offer a return, a perspective which should be more attractive as putting your money on a saving account with 8% interests without risks. These times are gone since the 2000s. So before people discuss insane valuation they should check out the fiscal and economical policies. Now back to PLTR and why the price is difficult to set (cheap imo). First of all PLTR did a direct listing without an investment bank for their share offerings. Its lacking of the valuation which they usually would get through such a process. PLTR wanted to do IPO with Morgan Stanley but it was mess. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-04/morgan-stanley-s-long-romance-of-palantir-pays-off-as-ipo-nears Morgan Stanley proved themselves many times as stubborn communists when it comes to valuations. I mean you guys remember their disgusting price targets for tesla like 100$ post split or stuff like that. These guys are very focused on numbers and I know it’s difficult to price in the potential and perspectives. But you can’t ignore these things for a fundamental valuation. If you want to consider these things in the price you have to understand the business of the company. This ended that one team at Morgan Stanley valuated PLTR with 5 billion while another team thought they worth 40 billion. https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2018/11/14/palantir-ipo-valuation-morgan-stanley.html How is this difference possible and why is this happening? Because people don’t understand what they are valuating. This happened a lot in the last decade because the decision makers in these banks and many analyst don’t have any idea which metrics they should use on companies like that. They are using the metrics from classical industries on new business. They freaked out when Facebook was valued with 100 billion as IPO. Same with Twitter and in the last years it was Tesla. They said apple going to tank every damn year in the last decade. I honor Warren Buffet so much since he has the dignity to realize that he don’t understands something but at the same time he sees the potential and the trend. That’s why he hired 2 Chads who bought Snowflake for him. The transformation and the generation change didn’t happened yet. That’s why they try to use the metrics from Caterpillar on Tesla. Guys the whole market is mooning with the cheap liquidity. Pennystocks and zombie companies transforming into billion dollar market cap companies. Facebook as IPO had a market cap of 104 billion back in 2012. At that time it wasn’t possible for Facebook to monetize their users with selling ads. They just paid 100 billion for the potential in more difficult market conditions. Look at the IPOs like doordash, Bumble. I’m not going to call this a bubble. Just check out their business cases and use the metrics. Maybe its easier for people to understand Bumble and Doordash… On page 12 of the S1 (balance sheet) Form you can already see the huge positive trends in PLTRs revenue and their costs. All this without all the positive events and contracts PLTR recently got. PLTRs valuation is difficult and I think it’s miscalculated by pessimistic communist who don’t understand that their products are game changers for industries, governments and defense forces. Because of these points I think there is huge price potential for PLTR
5. Risks for PLTR
Despite the general market risks PLTR mentions at page 29 of the S1 Form the competitors as the main risk: “We face intense competition in our markets, and we may lack sufficient financial or other resources to maintain or improve our competitive position.” The S1 Form didn’t aged well. Actually I don’t think that PLTR would have any trouble with offering new shares. Also with Peter Thiel as one of the founders the financial side should be stable. As PLTR competitor people use to mention IBM. The boomers from IBM already surrendered with their Windows95 computers and decided to cooperate. The biggest threat would be big tech with big money like AMZN or APPL. You all now the stories about APPL and Spotify or AMZN and all the merchants. Even if the big players would step into PLTR markets it would be difficult for them since PLTRs products doesn’t rely on an Amazon store or on apple devices. PLTR is years ahead with their products. I think the greatest risk (still) are the boomerish arms industry and all the boomers in pentagon and other authorities. There are very corrupt infrastructures when it comes to decision making and assigning contracts. People fear changes but they can’t avoid the changes. With the recent judgements we can see a turn on the tables but the transformation will still take time. It’s a circuit breaker with an avalanche effect. The risk factors on page 16 on the S1 form mostly aren’t relevant anymore. People complained that PLTR wasn’t profitable for 18 years. Well PLTR was never designed to be profitable and Alex Karp once said “love us or leave us alone”. https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2020/09/09/palantir-ceo-makes-livestreamed-pitch-to-investors.html But even this changed recently. PLTR became profitable in 2020 with 130,000,000§. Now the same people complaining about how high the stock price compared to the profits. Well just you wait.
6. Conclusion and Outlook
If you still reading I have to admit that this was a lot text and i am sorry again about the lingo. Let’s connect the dots and bring this information to a point
The boomer coalition in the pentagon and in the arms industry is taken down by PLTR. They will able to get the governments contracts and the classic arms/defense industry is no match for PLTR products. The judgements of lawsuits were catalyst and the effects should be already shown in the next earnings. These were such underrated events but I think there still will be some odds but PLTRs situation is much better as it was a time ago. The chains are off!
PLTR superior products profits hugely from economy of scales. They don’t have any significant costs when they acquire new customers. Making the big data usable for decisions making is already very important and step by step people realize that this issue growing fast. We creating everyday more data than we did yesterday and leaving the majority of it as trace and unstructured data. We don’t work with it but big Institutions does.
Here is the passage from the S1 and I fully agree with it: “The systemic failures of government institutions to provide for the public — fractured healthcare systems, erosions of data privacy, strained criminal justice systems, and outmoded ways of fighting wars — will continue to require both the public and private sectors to transform themselves. We believe that the underperformance and loss of legitimacy of many of these institutions will only increase the speed with which they are required to change.”
PLTRs value. The current situation of the market with tons of liquidity seems like a bubble. People don’t know what to do with the cheap capital and people throwing it even on meme pennystocks.
Facebook had his ipo back in 2012 during much harder market conditions as now. The valuation of Facebook was over 100 billion and people called it insanely overvalued. They did it because Facebook didn’t had a way to monetize their users (especially on mobile platforms). Facebook has a market cap of over 750 billion now and nobody calling it over valued. A remember the recent examples? Bumble?! Bruuuh. Don’t get me wrong if you invested in Bumble but they have nothing special to offer and their business case can easily copied or improved by others. Its shows the current state of our market with the crazy liquidity that even zombie companies got astronomic valuations. Use these metrics on PLTR with great products, great management, low cost base and less odds as ever before…. PLTR price is wrong imo especially in this market and with PLTRs current state and perspective.
Do you use PLTR? Me Neither! It’s not designed for us and we have to inform us about the success. PLTRs new contracts and their future are shining bright. With the settled lawsuits the sky is clear for PLTR. But their customer base is not only America. I’m not a murican and 3 weeks before I just find out that the police departments in our state using PLTR products. I don’t need to link endless evidences here since you can google it by yourself and see how many contracts PLTR recently got. Especially after the circuit breakers we talked about.
I have genuinely trust into Peter Thiel and Alex Karp that their will make the best of PLTRs potential. The odds getting removed and the demand for PLTR is increasing. If all these information would priced in correctly we would have a share price of at least 60-70$. With upcoming and ongoing positive events PLTR share price should soar more.. What’s next? Now we have earnings ahead and the lock up period ending. For the earnings I think the number will be fine and keep up the positive trend on revenue with a disproportionately trend of the costs. The most important part will be guidance for 2021. We should listen closely and see if the magic is already happening. The second event is the ending of the lock up period. You all remember the end of the lock up period of Nikola? Just 1-2 days after they announced they don’t got the GM deal? The stock tanked – for a good reason. You know the guy Trevor Milton. But in PLTRs case everything is different. Despite the successful deals they got, does a guy who says “love us or leave us alone” sounds like someone who going to drop his shares at the first possibility? I don’t expect such a behavior from Alex Karp and neither from Peter Thiel. If some employees drop their shares it should be fine. I would appreciate if the stock prices would go below 3ß. It would create a healthy bullish chart pattern and would be actually a nice discount to get in or stock up. I don’t think that the shares going to dump a lot because of this event. The earnings and the guidance are more important and the key events if you want to invest mid – long term. What does all this means for you? Nothing! Please don’t do any market activity based on my DD. I’m just sharing my knowledge and looking for critics so I can reevaluate my theses. This is not a financial advice. My hearts bleeding for all the GME holders. My last Reddit account got banned because I criticized “the pumpers”. In one of the comments I called the mods gay and got banned permanently (bye bye 20 k karma). If you are new to this please don’t do any decision based on this so I can sleep gladly. I’m not well positioned and not trying to pump this stock. I have 70 shares and a CSP. Fair play and fuck all the bots and pump and dumper we recently got in the sub! Leave an upvote if this post helped you. I need some more karma to be able to shitpost everywhere again!
In my 28 years of Gaming Experiences... Cyberpunk 2077 is by far the most unbalanced gaming experience I've had to date.
Hi all, I feel like it's time to share my opinions and thoughts after letting this subreddit cooldown for sometime. Around February of last year, I began work on a massive passion project developing https://NETRUNNER2077.net after following this title and being a massive fan of CD Projekt Red from the original Witcher title. When they announced Cyberpunk 2077 would be their next IP I was immensely excited as I'm a huge Cyberpunk genre nerd in all forms from art, movies, anime, philosophies, books, cultural significance and relation, aesthetics and more. So having my all time favorite game company work on a huge open world Cyberpunk "RPG" instantly generated immediate interest. Now where to even begin? Please note, I've yet to purposely "finish" Cyberpunk 2077 in hopes of CD Projekt Red making a strong come back later on in the future, and hopes that they'll eventually release a REDKit for modders in order to create some incredible work and help flesh the game world out. I have put around close to 200 hours into Cyberpunk 2077 exploring the different Life Paths and their effects on the world. Lots of walking, No fast travel and tons of time lost in an attempt to "Immerse" myself in the experience. I refused to finish Cyberpunk 2077's Main Story for several reasons. The largest being I'm typically against playing titles that are obviously not complete. On top of that, I've invested so much time and effort into researching, designing, learning web design and working towards building an awesome platform in order to properly cover Cyberpunk 2077 with a safe bet of thinking "This couldn't possibly be bad" only to coming around to reality very shortly after and that this title truly needed ATLEAST another year of development time. There are aspects of Cyberpunk 2077 that are, in my opinion, worthy of putting it in the all time legendary category of games. Then.. other parts that make games from even 20 years ago look superior. It's a very "unbalanced" experience. So much that it takes the top spot for me personally. My experience of Cyberpunk 2077 is that it feels unfinished and some what rushed in many areas, if that isn't obvious enough already. But the thing is, as many of you probably already know, it just isn't bugs. Features, Content, Weapons, Immersive Elements, AI, RPG Elements and Game Design Systems are flat out missing or just straight up broken entirely. Here are just a few of the elements that I have a problem with personally..
Weapon Balance - Many weapons are straight up overpowered and unbalanced and easy to find early in the game.
Weapon Variety - CD Projekt Red claimed that the game would have a large variety of weapons - this ended up not being the case with a few showcased weapons not implemented in the game itself although they exist in the game files. Also to note most "Iconic" weapons are just a reskin.
Cyberware Balance & Variety - Same thing as above can also account for Cyberware. Outside of Cyber Arm implants, which has its own bulletin
Very Hard Difficulty - Feels like a joke when compared to a lot titles out there. This is coming from someone who chose Style over Substance in all three playthroughs, typically never using a Jacket, Helmet or Mask. I'm no means great at games. This doesn't help with the extremely bugged out AI.
Perk Balance and Design - All around, most perks feel unrewarding and feel vastly unbalanced, once again making it pretty easy to feel overpowered pretty quickly early on, especially if you end up going down the Quickhacking Sub Skill Tree.
Pedestrian, Water and Car Damage Physics / Collision needs a serious second look - Water as of Patch 1.1 is still a pretty much nothing more than a transparent texture.. fire a bullet, a person, hell.. a fucking car and there is not a single pinch of reaction from that what so ever. The collision from bullets, other cars, people and objects is just bad for a 2020 game.
UI - I'm usually not one to complain about an unintuitive UI but it's quite clunky that takes some time to get around and use to.
Artificial Intelligence - It's either extremely bugged or just barely there. It's very bare bones in EVERY NON SCRIPTED aspect of the game. This has already been covered a thousand times so there's no need to go deep into detail with this. Vehicles, Police, Pedestrians, Etc.
Lack of Immersive Elements - One of CD Projekt Red biggest selling points for many fans was making it sound like there would be many ways to Immerse yourself in Cyberpunk 2077. That is not the case outside of World Design, World Building and Story Telling. It's really hard to actually "Immersive yourself and Roleplay" You can't sit at a bar and grab a drink in real time. You can't grab food anytime you like and eat in real time, the few vendors there are in the game completely rip you out of the game world and into a standard UI vendor menu. Installing Cyberware is just a click of a button in a menu after the initially Eye and hand implant, There's bare minimum interactivity with NPC's or the world itself for that matter, Not a single soul uses an umbrella that I've witnessed when it rains in Night City, There's little to no sense in danger outside of the repetitive Gang hotspots... the list could go on and on with this one.
90% of the choices you make during Cyberpunk 2077 feel like they have little to no consequence - While it's true that there are SOME choices you make in this game change certain outcomes (For the most part - the end of the game as reported by many) It feels like a very bare bones system that doesn't seem fleshed out at all. The majority of the time you're only given the "Illusion of Choice" This was very disappointing to witness. Life path decisions feel utterly meaningless later on down the road.
Side Quests are typically very short when compared to Witcher 3 - On top of that, there are a handful of stunning Side quests but it was very disappointing when a large majority of them lasted around 5-10 minutes at most. If you're looking for another Baron equivalent quest line.. It ain't here chief.
The Main Quest is far too short for a game that attempts to coin itself as being "RPG" - Regardless of not finishing, its pretty obvious that you do a small handful of Main Story Quests (Outside of the Optional ones) and you've reached the end.
Life Paths do not largely impact your overall experience and the way the game and story unfolds - Outside of the VERY beginning of the game, which can roughly take around 10 to 20 minutes to do.. and maybe a single quest depending on your lifepath, They ended up being extremely disappointing. You really aren't missing out on doing multiple life paths as you can basically "choose" your ending at the epilogue of the game and just restart from a save and make a different decision to see different outs. AKA making all the decisions you made throughout the game feel meaningless because in the end, its only what you choose during the epilogue that really matters.
A Second Note on Life Paths and Dialogue Impacting Secondary and Third Playthroughs - Very few side main quests can make a small difference by the end and there is no tension build up for your dialogue options that will lead to consequences that make you afraid of your choices later down the story.
What the hell happened to Meredith Stout? - If you went down the route of siding with Meredith Stout during the Maelstrom Mission and have followed Cyberpunk 2077 for some time you were probably completely thrown off as to how cut off that whole "follow up" went down. Very disappointing.
Dynamic Vehicle Chases / Fights are not a thing and were removed from the game - The one Scav chase in the beginning of the game is scripted.. and that's about it, hell.. you can just sit in the vehicle and watch it crash into the wall without doing a single thing. What the hell? Sorry guys, If you choose to mess with gangs.. they're not going to hunt you down, they aren't going to mow you down while you're in your vehicle. It was all bullshit.
Gangs / Corps will ignore the actions you take against their gang / corp and there are no repercussions for your actions against them at any point in the game - This goes with the one above, but I figured I'd expand on it more. Remember when we thought siding with Maelstrom would cause dire consequences in the long run with Meredith and Militech? Guess what? it definitely isn't a thing. You can go about your business in Night City and not have to worry about that for a split second your entire playthrough, no matter who you decide to fuck over.
Side Gigs are typically just filler content - Very little variety and the only way to really extend your playtime if you choose to not walk the streets of a dead feeling night city attempting to immerse yourself in the world. Which is totally okay if there were also other things to do, but for the most part its just generic Ubisoft tier filler content. There are a very SMALL amount of unique ones with actual dialogue.
Netrunner Enemy Types - The worst they do is upload a low quality damage hack and that's it. Half the time they scan your location and nothing happens. No cool shit like having to tap a button repeatedly to stop you from pulling the trigger on yourself after being hacked.
Pacifica is obviously unfinished - Well, it's not hard to tell that Pacifica wasn't complete after the game came out, I fully know the lore behind what happened to Pacifica, but I don't see how it's acceptable that there are literally unfinished areas from game development.
MAX-TAC and Trauma Team were epic during the early Scav Hideout mission, but that's it - Not much else to say here other than they had some really cool "scripted" events during and after that mission.. but other than that you'll see Trauma Team with their ships in the same exact spots you find them and MAX-TAC basically just spawn in as higher tier cops when your wanted level is high enough.
Cyberpsycho Quest line was a missed opportunity - Quite a disappointing quest after tracking down 17 Cyberpsychos regardless if you choose to let them live or kill them. They could of gone deep into some gritty cyberpunk writing and mystery with this but their approach to this was pretty underwhelming and surface level with no depth other than some logs you find, but this can be said about MANY of the quests during the game.
Collecting Cars is just more checkmark optional filler - Hey? Want another vehicle? Let me flood your quest list and phone letting you know you can GPS right to the location and pick it up. Outside of the few hidden vehicles in the game, Collecting cars was pretty disappointing. You literally walk up to location and buy them, no interactivity with NPC's, just click and buy. Might as well of just given a option to have the vehicle self deliver to the non existent garage where all my other cars reside right?
The Garage outside your Megabuilding serves no purpose and doesn't store your vehicles - Can't find your vehicles there now can you? Yeah..
The 6 Month Montage felt like a giant slap in the face, quite possibly cut missions from early game and is the exact SAME no matter what life path you choose - Going down any life path will grant you the exact same Street Kid themed montage. It really feels like these were cut missions that would of fleshed Jackie Welles as a character out so much better.
Cyberpunk 2077 feels more like a decent "Action Adventure" Game rather than a true "RPG" - Not too hard to see this. While it has RPG elements and Dialogue, it's definitely not on the level of Dues Ex, Vampire Bloodlines, Divinity, Elder Scrolls, Fallout (3 & NV). After you exit the prologue it is all downhill after that.
There isn't much to find and see outside of map markers - While there are a handful of secrets, schematics and weapons it doesn't feel very rewarding when finding these things because of how the weapon, items, currency and game design elements were implemented where things are either easily replaced or you're already easily overpowered as it is.
Cyberpunk tries to be too many things and falls short of most of them - With the Ambitious goals, talk and promises.. The one thing I hoped it would be was a truly Ambitious RPG with some really good Immersive elements. I definitely wasn't expecting the world, but it's just sad as to how many elements it falls flat on.
Black Market Cyberware isn't a thing - You see those four options you have for Cyber arms? Yep, That's it. Nothing else, Everything shown through trailers is what you get.
Brain Dance was a MASSIVE missed opportunity - It's pretty obvious that there was at one time far more to brain dance outside of story missions. Hell, it could of found a way to replace the Gwent Mini Game, but alas - In the end it was used for only story missions and not a single side experience on its own.
Night City just feels like a extremely gorgeous backdrop to a Somewhat Linear story - I've already covered several reasons as to why I feel this way.
It feels more like "Johnny's Story" rather than V's Story - While the writing is indeed excellent most of the time. I personally feel like this story is more about Johnny rather than V.
The sense of urgency after the prologue really makes it hard to "Role Play" V correctly. This conflicts with previous statements made by CDPR "Really wanting players to Role Play the character"- The way this was approached was quite confusing, as CDPR offers this massive world yet having a huge urgency that you need to figure out a solution before you die in a few weeks.
The World does not feel "Alive" by any means.. Lack of Dynamic Events - The world itself just feels pretty dead outside of flying vehicles and ads going off every 4-5 seconds. There is VERY little dynamic content like you see in RDR2 where they put a huge emphasis on the world feeling "alive" and never knowing what could happen.
Customization is severely lacking from a world that begs for more of it - Luckily if you're on PC, a lot of these issues have been solved with customizable Cyber arms, More tattoos, Hair Styles, Face and Neck Cyberware and more. If you're on Console though, you're sadly shit out of luck. The lack of visible Cyberware for V was very surprising. No visible Cyber legs, No visible Netrunning gear outside of "Suits", etc.
Jackie Welles was a brilliant character that was quickly thrown away - Let alone the massive spoiler they decided to showcase via the 2019 E3 CG Trailer, It was extremely disheartening to know that saving Jackie was never an option seeing as we were barely given any time with him and a wasted opportunity for possible great plot points. This could of been remedied by actually going through the missions played out in the 6 month montage. For players unfamiliar following Cyberpunk 2077 for so long, I would assume losing Jackie wasn't near as impactful for them.
Cyberware Arm implants are just alternative weapons for the most part - Which pretty much become useless unless you choose to use Gorilla Fists the whole game. No Utility from them, No useful tool elements, Just weapons that become obsolete very fast.
For a Dystopian World that is hyper sexualized, there sure is a lack of sexual content - Not hard to miss this, You have two Joy Toys and two high end JT's later in the game to choose from in the entirety of Night City outside of the selection of Story related characters you come across. Hell, even a lot of characters that dance on poles in the world are fully clothed. Let alone any real Adult themed clubs.
Trains were a missed opportunity - Let's face it, there were obviously systems in place at one point in development to have an actual train system where you could ride around Night City and be able to enjoy the huge vistas that it offers. Now you can just watch one from a distance disappear right through a building.
Verticality? Sort of..? - Take your Home Megabuilding for example and also prime example of cut areas and content. There were suppose to be several areas of verticality to explore in the world and areas and this is just not the case anymore.
"You'll never run into cool areas where you'll want to get in there but can't" - Yeah, that was definitely not the case now was it? There are several areas you would think would be accessible but just aren't or at any point in the game are.
Acid Rain? Yeah.. No. - Remember this? Yeah I haven't witnessed it either. But hey, at least there's acid fog right?
Then you have this huge dystopic metropolis of a city which looks absolutely phenomenal. I think it'll truly go down in history for its amazing design and the techniques they used to craft this insanely dense city. There's truly nothing like visiting Night City and it surely is a unique experience from a VISUAL and AUDIO design standpoint. The writing is solid most of the time as well. It really just feels like they had a very direct deadline and were forced to wrap systems up after changing the core game several times over and over again which caused loads of bugs in the code. I really hope when I come back to this game in a year it'll be quite different but after what CDPR pulled I find it extremely hard to trust and have faith in them. I had so much faith and love in this company that I ended up spending countless months building, designing, and launching NETRUNNER 2077 almost single handedly but after playing Cyberpunk 2077 for weeks, I couldn't even bring myself to write a review over it. Honestly, I would've been way too critical and harsh. Especially after having to monitor and dissect everything that was "said" to be in the game and how systems were suppose to "work" and it ended up being nothing like that what so ever. At this point and time I have no motivation or confidence to continue the platform due to the recent events and actions of CDPR's upper management as well as the highly manipulative marketing that made Cyberpunk 2077 only a glass half full of what it was intended to actually be. I made sure to set my expectations accordingly from what was told from developers to fans via interviews, deep dives and what was reported to sources that was approved by CDPR. With that and the EXTREMELY misleading marketing, it leaves an extremely sour taste in my mouth. I really want to have faith that they can turn this title around, but something feels off. I understand from a legal perspective that they probably cant at the moment. I just hope one day that this game can truly live up to its potential. There is an incredible foundation set, but it's ultimately up to CD Projekt Red if they choose to deliver their originally intended vision. For other upper management in game development out there possibly reading this- if your game isn't finished, please market it correctly as an "Early Access Game" and not a finished product. That is straight up lying and deceiving fans and consumers out there. It isn't right, and needs to stop.
MVIS: Shiny Laser Go Pew ⚡ No But Seriously They Are Gonna Take Over The LiDAR Industry
So, the day has come, and MicroVision's market cap is finally big enough so that you won't get banned for mentioning it on WSB. But what is it? Why have they seen an 800%+ increase in three months? Where are they headed? Allow me to explain. About Them MicroVision, Inc. (MVIS) makes futuristic-as-fuck laser technology that's used in self driving cars and augmented reality headsets. This already sets them apart from a major competitors like Velodyne (VLDR), which focuses solely on LiDAR for self driving cars. Sumit Sharma, the CEO, was head of operations at Google's Project GLASS and has worked to map hardware development at Motorola, also worked at Jawbone. Source Why have they been increasing 800% in three months while similar companies in the same sector see a fraction of that gain? Because their tech is much more advanced than the competition, and they were (are) criminally undervalued. The reason they're so undervalued is because the first thing hedge funds see when they research a potential investment is the balance sheet, and on paper MVIS looks like shit. (Low assets, high liabilities) Even I saw the movement back in December, did some research, and was like "Wtf is this? I need to get puts" But once you do research into their product, who their customers are, and the future of the industry that they are involved in, you see that MicroVision is a turnaround story similar to that of Plug Power; both are 90's futuristic companies that people got way too excited about in 2000, have struggled to make it to 2020, but now are about to finally have their heyday. And they got a $13 million equity facility (loan) in December that greatly improved their balance sheet, making them appeal to institutions, and bringing Vanguard and Blackrock to invest in MVIS days later. I actually had a hedge fund manager tell me that MVIS was doomed to run out of cash in Q1 2020, but if they secured funds then they would have a lot of potential. I go over that in the comments. MVIS (left) vs PLUG (right) 1990's until present Anyways, what is this "much more advanced" technology? I'll just let this chart do the talking: The MicroVision Consumer LIDAR being compared here isn't even their model designed for self-driving cars, that will be coming in April. The resolution it can take as input/second, the points per second, is key when it comes to how clearly the LiDAR sensor can see, how accurately it can identify what it is seeing, and how quickly it can react. That chart is from 2 years ago and still the best resolution Velodyne can provide today is only 4,800,000 pps in their most advanced model, the "Alpha Prime"
3D Lidar Data Points Generated 2- Single Return Mode: ~ 2,400,000 points per second- Dual Return Mode: ~ 4,800,000 points per second.
VLDR has not publicly announced a price for their Alpha Prime yet, but historically their top of the line devices cost $75,000. I have seen unsourced numbers of the Alpha Prime costing $100,000. That was last year, will probably be brought down to be more reasonable for automakers to purchase. They did announce a $500 model called the Velarray H800 in November, but the only thing they said about its pps resolution is that its "outstanding"... lol. As for Luminar (LAZR), they will launch the new model "Iris" in 2022, which will cost about $1,000: (the same price as MicroVision's device to be revealed in April). It will also only operate at 10Hz. This is similar to playing a racing game at 10FPS. If you know anything about video games, you know that this is unplayable.
Iris will cost less than $1,000 per unit for production vehicles seeking serious autonomy, and for $500 you can get a more limited version for more limited purposes like driver assistance, or ADAS. Luminar says Iris is 'slated to launch commercially on production vehicles beginning in 2022,' but that doesn't mean necessarily that it's shipping to customers right now. The company is negotiating more than a billion dollars in contracts at present, a representative told me, and 2022 would be the earliest that vehicles with Iris could be made available.
A lengthy post has been make comparing Luminar's resolutions with MicroVision's, which was not easy to calculate because Luminar said their resolution was "300dpi/spdeg", a statistic that is incomprehensible for shareholders because its not the common specification of millions (3D) points per second. Here's the math, I sum it all up at the bottom:
Luminar's Hydra claims resolution of "up to 200 points per square degree" and a FOV of 120° x 30° (degrees). (and 300 points for Iris, the one coming in 2022.) However, the vertical FOV can be configured from 1° to 30° , which likely explains the use of "up to" in the resolution numbers. Generally, as FOV expands, resolution shrinks, assuming a constant pixel stream. This is why Alex Kipman made such a big deal about MSFT maintaining resolution in Hololens 2(YT links aren't allowed apparently) while expanding FOV because it required more pixels to do so. Specifically, regarding Luminar, is 200 points per square degree available when FOV is at the maximum 120° x 30°? Or is it available only at a lesser FOV such as, for example, 120° x 5°? The use of "up to" suggests the latter. Even assuming 200 points per square degree at 120° x 30° is available, which is not conceded given the stated "up to", that would yield a total resolution of 720,000 points. MVIS claims capacity in excess of 20M points per second. At a resolution of 720,000 points, Luminar would require a frame rate of 27.7 Hz to equal 20M points per second. Luminar's specs do not suggest that its technology is capable of such a high frame rate at this resolution. This is not surprising given it does not use MEMS micromirrors but something more "mechanical" including, as per a recent patent, spindles and a drive belt (1) At video time 19:56, Luminar compares the specs of its Iris product to industry requirements. The graphic reveals that Luminar's 2022 production lidar, Iris, will support resolution of 300 points per square degree at 10 Hz. Assuming that resolution applies to the entire FOV of 120 x 30 degrees and not just a portion of the FOV, that would imply a points per second value of 120 x 30 x 300 x 10 Hz = 10.8M points per second. If the 300 points/ sq. deg applies only to a smaller FOV, the points per second figure would be proportionally smaller. Microvision claims 20M points per second for its current MEMS lidar. The company also advises that its technology is capable of more than 20M points/sec.
TLDR: The best case scenario for Luminar is that their 2022 model will have 10.8 million pps, but in reality its probably much lower than that because of FOV configurations, careful wording by press releases, and Hz limitations. Additional Interesting insight on Luminar and their tech lagging behind is in the comments, this post is long enough already. Again the MicroVision Consumer LIDAR (specifications) being used for comparison here isn't even their model designed for self-driving cars. Their device specialized for cars, the "1st gen Long Range LiDAR (LRL) Sensor", will be coming in April.
We expect our 1st generation LRL Sensor to have range of at least 250 meters and the highest resolution at range of any lidar with 340 vertical lines up to 250 meters, 568 vertical lines up to 120 meters and 944 vertical lines up to 60 meters. This equatesto 520 points per square degree.
(For those who read the math on LAZR, notice he doesn't say up to) It testing is successful, the 1st Generation LRL Sensor will be able to calculate velocity of objects relative to itself, and be able to be used in Level 3 and Level 4 self-driving applications
Our LRL Sensor will also output velocity of moving objects relative to an ego vehicle across our dynamic field of view in real-time 30 Hz sensor output. This sensor would accelerate development of Level 3 (L3) autonomous safety and Level 4 (L4) autonomous driving features that are important to potential customers and interested parties.
What is Level 3 and Level 4 autonomous driving? https://preview.redd.it/n4c8831l9dh61.png?width=848&format=png&auto=webp&s=0652984c72da3159b53a4fc4058c9d9e33cc6b05 Level 1 is feet off, level 2 is hands off, level 3 is eyes off, level 4 is mind off, and level 5 is full passenger (you can sit in the back). So basically, they have that 2045 technology today, while everyone else is trying to play catch-up. How is it so advanced? It all lies in the high resolution of the laser sensors.
I've seen MVIS's LiDAR in action at a shareholder meeting. It can recognize people. This has been described on MicroVision's conference calls, and has been described with significant additional safety and convenience features. This could identify individual people Can distinguish between pets and people (or YOUR pet and the neighbors pet) Can distinguish between normal behaviors and strange things that could be of concern Could save face-scans of intruders and allow intruders to be identified later Source
LiDAR is the only sensor that gives you resolution at range: the ability to get very fine and very accurate detection of objects in space.
that's why Teslas use radar systems in addition to their cameras, still not good enough to prevent fatalities on the road using Tesla's "full self-driving" software. Also, cameras struggle with light glare, weather, and 3D imaging, while LiDAR fixes all those issues. The main advantage of cameras are their resolution, and MicroVision is bridging the gap. So, will testing be successful?
We expect the capability of our LRL Sensor to meet or exceed OEM requirements, based on technology we have scaled multiple times over the last decade, as being a very strong strategic advantage. (Same source)
This product has been getting fine tuned for years and I am personally confident that they will be able to outperform in their testing. Demonstration(YT links aren't allowed apparently) of their consumer LiDAR product from 2018 (make sure your quality is all the way up). Growing Industry The self-driving cars market is expected to reach 220.44 billion dollars by 2025. This includes taxi, civil, public transport, heavy duty trucks, ride shares, and ride hail (UBER - 72 B mkt cap) applications. Traffic Accidents in the US aloneCost 871 Billion A Year, even just yesterday there was an insane pileup on the I-35W highway in Texas that killed 6, injured 36, and damaged 133 vehicles. Not only self-driven cars need LiDAR. In a few years, as soon as MicroVision's 1st Gen LRL is available, LiDAR systems will certainly become mandatory for (still) human-controlled cars to avoid collisions. This tech could become as revolutionary and successful as airbags. Airbags are a 37.3 billion dollar industry. If only 10% of the cars produced annually contain four Microvision LRL systems, this will result in a volume of 364 million units in ten years. (9.1 million cars * 4 modules * 10 years) And this is a conservative calculation, both a higher market share, more cars produced, and more modules per car are conceivable. At least 4 LRL devices will be necessary to establish a \"circle of safety.\" Augmented Reality The Hololens 2 is an example of a Virtual Reality Device (VRD) manufactured by Microsoft that uses MicroVision MEMS Laser Scanning display modules inside. NASA & Lockeed Martin using Hololens (Video)(YT links aren't allowed apparently)
'When a technician puts on the Hololens, they instantly see the work instruction, instead of having to go through stacks of rectangular data, whether its paper or another form of a screen'... 'We see a reduction in cost, increases in quality'... 'What we've found is we can take an 8 hour activity and reduce it down to 45 minutes'... 'We haven't had a single error that's been documented'...
This new GPS system comes equipped with an augmented reality heads-up-display (HUD) that attaches directly to your sun visor. This laser-projected GPS micro-display, developed in collaboration with MicroVision, makes it appear that your route directions show directly on top of the road, letting you keep your eyes on the road at the same time.
Cook was asked about what he expects to be the biggest tech developments in the next five to 10 years. Cook’s response made it clear that he sees augmented reality as the future, calling it the “next big thing.”
While attending a trauma call in the early stages of the pandemic, Mr Kinross noticed that 29 people were working in close proximity. He realized the established way of working would have to change dramatically.
The technician is then linked with a Mercedes-Benz specialist working remotely who can see what the tech sees and communicate in real-time -- manipulating the holographic information with annotations, highlighting areas of focus, pointing at things in the real world and presenting documents and service manuals.
In the next few years, business verticals will be possible in the markets for smart glasses (Video)(YT links aren't allowed apparently) and projections with touchless input(YT links aren't allowed apparently) and gesture control. For example, an eyewear company could develop the smallest and lightest smart glasses device on the market using the chip in that smart glasses video.
In the MicroVision Augmented Reality video, for example, we share a potential module design using our existing MEMS technology platform that could offer the lightest, smallest in volume, low power module with up to 40 degrees field of view packaged into eye wear that resembles frames currently accepted in the market. I believe one could see how our module in the design example would be compelling for a mass-market product.Source
Patents MicroVision has 484 patents granted and pending. This was enough to get them on the Ocean Tomo 300 Patent Value Index. What is that you ask?
The Ocean Tomo 300® Patent Value Index includes the top value companies of the broad- market Ocean Tomo 300® Patent Index, as determined by the price-to-book ratio, and is diversified across market capitalization. It is the industry’s first value index based on the value of intellectual property and represents a portfolio of 60 companies with the highest innovation ratio (i.e., patent maintenance value relative to book value). Source
This index also outperforms the Russel 1000 and the S&P 500. Their intellectual property includes in-house developed custom MEMS, custom optics, proprietary digital and analog silicon chips, embedded real-time firmware and software, manufacturing processes, custom automation and strategic partnerships that allow them to operate in a sleek model. MicroVision patents and products therefore serve many future markets:
Whoever has the MicroVision technology may be able to eliminate the competition or demand license fees from them. Or the other way around: Whoever does not buy the technology can be excluded from markets. Therefore, bidding competition may arise to gain access to the market. Whoever has the best LiDAR system for cars will also be able to supply other components and software to car manufacturers. The car manufacturer who has the best LiDAR system has a big advantage over the competition. All Notable Competition: Velodyne LiDAR, Luminar, Sense Photonics, Robosense, Valeo, SureStar MicroVision: founded in 1993 Velodyne Lidar VLDR: founded in 1983, but as a subwoofer company 😂 and only got into LiDAR in 2005 LAZR: founded in 2012 Non-Public: Valeo: Founded in 1998 Robosense: Founded in 2014 SureStar: Founded in 2005 Basically, MVIS is all these other companies' daddy. They have been working on LiDAR for almost 30 years and it shows, just imagine what they will be able to develop in a few years with more funding. https://preview.redd.it/eh5csdcz9dh61.png?width=1600&format=png&auto=webp&s=068fe6f5508e693ace5c6c56d4d2a5d9294836fb Insider Activity MicroVision is very transparent with its inner workings of the company, you can easily reach out to them on their website under "Investors." One of many conferences held with Vice President David Westgor, investor relations manager Dave Allen, and investors of MVIS revealed:
As to the employee incentive plan, Steve Holt made the point that in his 7 years of experience (I think it was) with MVIS, NO EMPLOYEE had actually ever cashed out in the money options.
Case in point, on December 1s, 2020, the day after she joined the team, Judith Curran was paid with 3 million dollars worth of $3 calls expiring in 2022, and she has not cashed out. On Yahoo it reports that the last insider sale was in 2014. Institutional Investments For reasons stated earlier, institutions have been late to the game on this one, but now are starting to get on the rocket ship before it takes off. MVIS is now the largest holding in the S&P Kensho Moonshots Index, (KMOONP), which is literally an ETF of stocks that are going go the moon 🌙 . Blackrock purchased 2.44 million shares on December 31, 2020. Vanguard purchased 6.61 million shares on the same day. Recent Events MVIS's stagnation really started to break on December 1st 2020, with MVIS when former Ford Executive Judith Curran was added to MVIS's board of directors.
Curran is an accomplished senior automotive executive with over 30 years of experience in vehicle program, engineering and technology leadership. Curran has a strong record of leading innovation at Ford Motor Company where she served in a number of executive positions including Director of Technology Strategy, where she developed the cross-vehicle global strategy for key new technologies including assisted driving, infotainment, new electrical architectures, and connectivity.
Doesn't take a genius to figure out they were about to ride the EV wave, and were appointing the right people to be poised to do so. Eight days later on December 8th 2020, the US Congress approved approximately $700M for the roll-out of IVAS in 2021. 7 days after that on December 15th, MVIS broke $4 for the first time in nine years. December 29, 2020: MicroVision Announces $13 Million At-the-Market Equity Facility (this is huge for improving balance sheet and attracting hedge funds/institutional ownership)
So far, our team remains on track to complete our Long Range Lidar sensor sample in April 2021. We believe this financing will further solidify our balance sheet as we remain committed to pursuing strategic alternatives and establishing value for our shareholders,” said Sumit Sharma, MicroVision Chief Executive Officer. “We expect a stronger balance sheet will provide the Company with runway through 2021 and into the first quarter of 2022 to enable us to continue development of our lidar sensor while pursuing strategic alternatives,” said Steve Holt, MicroVision Chief Financial Officer.
December 31: Vanguard adds 6.6 million shares, Blackrock adds adds 2.4. January 20, 2021: Apple CEO Tim Cook says Augmented Reality is the "Next Big Thing." Feb 2, 2021 YooToob stock analyst Deadnsyde covers(YT links aren't allowed apparently) MVIS, causing the beginning of a large breakout past $8. Feb 4: MicroVision granted patent (WSB bot is blocking source from being posted- thinks it contains a ticker), essentially lidar on a chip, this patent in particular is huge. (solid state lidar) Feb 10: Cramer mentions MVIS, says LIDAR is one of three battlegrounds for EV competition. Feb 10 after hours: MVIS announces Progress on Automotive Long Range LiDAR, saying “We expect MicroVision’s Long Range Lidar Sensor, (LRL Sensor) which has been in development for over two years, to meet or exceed requirements established by OEMs for autonomous safety and autonomous driving features,” said Sumit Sharma, Chief Executive Officer of MicroVision. Feb 11: Volkswagen and Microsoft team up on automated driving (potential for MVIS to get involved). Talent at MicroVision Sumit Sharma became the CEO in February of 2020, he is a mechanical engineer that has been with MVIS for five years after having been the head of operations at Google Project Glass, and working for Motorola and Jawbone. Dr. Mark Spitzer is on the board of directors having previously worked at Google X, Darpa, Kopin and having founded Myvu and Photonic Glass. Judy Curran joined the board this year after spending 30 years at Ford, where she was the Director of Technical Strategy. She is also the Head of Global Automotive Strategy for Ansys, a simulation software company that works with ADAS systems. Technical analysis Resistance at 46.75, 123. 39, and 204. 23, could turn to supports. Moving Average Analysis: On February 28, 2020, Market Cap of PLUG was 1.32B, on this date the 120 day MA touches the 8y moving average. 11 months later, PLUG has a market cap of 33.79B, an increase of 2459%. On September 3, 2020, Market Cap of MVIS was 0.21B, on this date 120 day MA touches the 8y moving average. 5 months later, MVIS has a market cap of 2.77B an increase of 1219%. 6 months forward price target: $34.348B Conclusion/Valuation/TLDR LAZR is currently valued at 12.22B VLDR at 3.92B MVIS at 2.77B MicroVision offers a quantitatively much higher performance product than both of its competitor companies. Because of their lack of focus on augmented reality technologies, competitors are not likely to have a future in the markets of smart glasses, healthcare, engineering, military equipment, GPS safety, entertainment, and interactive projectors. They are involved in an industry that is currently at an inflection point, due to grow massively in the near future. Their high number of extremely advanced patents will bring in significant revenue for the company in the coming years. I have never seen a company with such low insider selling, that the last case of a sale was in 2014. Institutional investors are piling in as MicroVision's balance sheet improves and they near the April LRL sensor test date, which has a high likelihood of being a success. I think this stock should currently be valued at 20 Billion dollars, taking all of this into account, and expect it to rise drastically over the next few years. This is not financial advice, I am not a financial advisor, do your own research before believing some retard on the internet. Positions: 300 shares, $19 call 5/21, $20 call 3/19, $31 call 2/19(FD), $28 call 2/19, $24 call 2/19.
Based on the overall revenue of the top 10 online gambling companies in the world are: International Game Technology PLC : USD 4.83 billion GVC Holdings PLC (Ladbrokes Coral Group) : USD 4.14 billion bet365 : USD 4.03 billion Scientific Games : USD 3.36 billion Paddy Power Betfair : USD 2.64 billion William Hill PLC : USD 2.28 billion The Stars Group : USD 2.02 billion Playtech : USD 1.75 billion Kindred Group PLC : USD 1.28 billion 888 Holdings PLC : USD 0.54 billion After the In this article we are going to list the 15 largest gaming companies in the world. Click to skip ahead and jump to the 10 largest gaming companies in the world. I have been an avid fan of gaming 10 Largest Video Game Companies in the World. June 30, 2019 by Jennifer Jones. The video gaming industry is one of the most competitive businesses in the world. Heavy-hitters like Sony and Microsoft are backed by decades of profit making in other electronics and computers. Other companies are on the list on the strength of strong sales for Top 30 mobile gaming companies in the world 2019. 1. Supercell. One of the leading and recognizable mobile gaming companies, Supercell is based in Helsinki, Finland. Founded in 2010, Supercell has had an astonishing growth curve thanks to popular game offerings like ‘Clash of Clans’ and ‘Hay Day.’. One more Japanes studio among the r ichest gaming companies. A pioneer in the industry thanks to handheld devices and some extraordinary projects, Nintendo is one of the three greatest game development companies of all time. Mario, Pokemon, and Legend of Zelda are the first names that may come to your mind when you encounter Nintendo logo. As one of the wealthiest gaming companies in the world, it boasts of total assets worth $2.875 billion as of 2020. A majority of the richest gaming companies are multinational corporations that have developed and published record-breaking video games. The biggest gaming companies and what they’re worth introducing the world to an entirely new way of gaming with the Gamecube and Wii consoles and for letting us race against donkeys and The graph shows the gaming revenue of public companies worldwide in the fourth quarter 2019. The Chinese conglomerate, Tencent, generated gaming revenue of over 5.2 billion U.S. dollars in the According to Ed Thomas, an analyst at GlobalData, gaming is "in the throes of a huge transformation from a product-oriented business to an as-a-service model.At the same time, new technologies like 5G, cloud and virtual reality will usher in a new phase of innovation, while new business models like support for in-game micropayments are already changing the economics of gaming." Video game companies today have elevated themselves to become one of the highest grossing in the technological sector and some have placed themselves higher than the others. Following are few of the top 10 richest video game companies in the world in 2019.
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